THE MODEL SCHOOLS INITIATIVE Phase One: Closeout Report · THE MODEL SCHOOLS INITIATIVE Phase One: Closeout Report ... and published a 20-week editorial series leading up to the 2014

THE MODEL SCHOOLS INITIATIVE Phase One: Closeout Report

Chronicling Five Years of Community-Based Work in the US Virgin Islands Public Education System

December 2009

2016 Edition

St. Croix Foundation for Community Development 1023 Market Street, Christiansted, VI 00820

(t) 340.773.9898 www.stxfoundation.org

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Prologue – Beyond 2010: Shifting from Programs to Policy .................................................. i Chapter 1 – Education First ..................................................................................................... 1

Introduction: Public Education Reform: Whatever It Takes .................................................... 1

Why We Dared To Try ........................................................................................................... 2

The Stark Realities of Public Education in the Virgin Islands ................................................. 3

Model Schools Initiative Overview ......................................................................................... 5

Transitioning Out of ECJH ..................................................................................................... 8

The Cost of Reform ............................................................................................................... 9

Chapter 2 – Our Children ....................................................................................................... 11 Our Children—Who are They? Who Can They Be? ............................................................ 11

Engaging Students in Learning by Building Relationships ................................................... 13

Reading Counts: But So Does Speech and Writing, Too ..................................................... 15

Who Can They Become? .................................................................................................... 16

Chapter 3 – Our Teachers ...................................................................................................... 18

Teachers: Our Greatest Assets and Impending Liabilities ................................................... 18

It’s the Teacher, It’s the Teacher, It’s the Teacher ............................................................... 20

The Impact of Bad Teachers ............................................................................................... 21

Leveraging Professional Development ................................................................................ 23

Chapter 4 – School Infrastructure and Resources .............................................................. 25

The Real Deal about Infrastructure and Resources in our Public Schools ........................... 25

Instructional Resource Gaps: Myth vs. Reality .................................................................... 27

Partnerships with Purpose................................................................................................... 29

Chapter 6 – Discipline ............................................................................................................ 32

Discipline and Structure—First and Always ......................................................................... 32

Structure First, Then Programs .......................................................................................... 34

Supporting Schools to Create Discipline and Structure ....................................................... 36

Providing Safe, Nurturing Environments for Student Achievement ...................................... 38

Chapter 7 – Bold Action and Innovative Reforms ................................................................ 39 Chapter 8 – Lessons Learned, Lessons Shared .................................................................. 44

Relevant Curriculum and World-class Standards ................................................................ 44

New Approaches to Leadership .......................................................................................... 45

Charter Schools… a viable option? ..................................................................................... 47

Private - Public Partnerships ............................................................................................... 49

Strategic Grant Making ........................................................................................................ 50

Final Thoughts– “Make No Small Plans” ............................................................................ 52 References

i

EPILOGUE

July 2016

Beyond 2010 – Shifting from Programs to Policy

Since this report was initially published in 2010, the St. Croix Foundation for Community Development has fulfilled our commitment to push for Territory-wide educational reform as a critical intersection of our public safety and economic development work. From 2010-2014, the Foundation’s Model Schools Initiative has funded professional development and training for teachers and administrators through strategic grant making, hosted community roundtables, and published a 20-week editorial series leading up to the 2014 Election Season that advocated for innovative public education reforms and urged citizens and all candidates for election to put “Education First”. This broad based work with a diverse cross-section of stakeholders has since led us to the most comprehensive and collaborative phase of our initiative to date – conducting a Systems Analysis of the Virgin Islands Public Education System and, in conjunction, developing the blueprint for a groundbreaking Teacher Leaders Collaborative to build system-wide consensus around a state-of-the art Teaching Laboratory.

MSI HISTORY St. Croix Foundation’s Model Schools Initiative (MSI) was created with the goal of developing a strategic and collaborative approach to support system-wide reforms in our public schools. Launched in 2005, at the Virgin Islands’ lowest performing middle school, Elena Christian Junior High School, our MSI supported replicable models of literacy-based academic programs and instructional best practices in our pilot school. Our five year on-the ground efforts resulted in a 30% increase in math scores and a near 70% reduction in discipline infractions. Recognizing that a school's success also depends on the capacity of the entire system to meet all the needs of both students and teachers, from 2005 to 2009, the MSI Fund provided resources to the Territory’s public school system by (1) supporting proven best practices, (2) nurturing strategic partnerships between key local stakeholders, including local private sectors industries, and (3) convening national educational ‘brain trusts.’ In partnership with generous corporate citizens, funding was secured for a state-of-the-art computer lab and technology center for student testing and faculty professional development. The Initiative grew over the course of five years to be one of the largest and most comprehensive public/private educational endeavors in the US Virgin Islands measured by investment and in scope. In 2009, the Foundation was nationally recognized by the National School Boards Association for our MSI’s success in supporting our pilot school’s transformation. With a total investment exceeding one million dollars, over the past ten years, the MSI has afforded the St. Croix Foundation extraordinary insight into what investments are working in our schools as well as what we believe are superficial Band-Aids for deeply entrenched systemic problems. As such, we ceased funding ‘niche’ programs (e.g. the newest ‘silver bullet’ in education) and instead embarked on a comprehensive systems analysis to determine the most critical trigger points that would positively impact the system. Today, the second phase of our MSI supports targeted education reform efforts and funds qualitative and quantitative research to build capacity and public will around innovative educational reforms.

ii

SHIFTING FROM PROGRAMS TO POLICY In 2010, the Foundation produced a summary report on the work supported through our Model Schools Initiative: Chronicling Five Years of Community-Based Work in the US Virgin Islands Public Education System. The 55-page report provided quantitative data and a detailed account of the MSI and our findings relative to the Territory’s educational system. The report also outlined the collective steps that we believe are necessary for comprehensive reform. The major conclusion drawn from 5 years of on-the-ground work in our local public schools was that in order to facilitate deep sustained and systemic impact, we had to shift our focus from programs to policy. Policy Mapping At the start of 2013, the Foundation convened a Steering Committee that consisted of a carefully selected cross-section of our community including business leaders, educators from public, private, and parochial schools as well as representatives from the University of the Virgin Islands and public sector agencies. Facilitated by our Policy Officer, the Committee has served as a research engine, mining through a maze of VI codes, organizational charts and operating policies, while also building consensus for the recognition that individual reforms intended to address one part of the system cannot happen in isolation of their the impact on the whole system.

SYSTEMS ANALYSIS The overarching objective of the Foundation’s Steering Committee has been, first and foremost, to understand the system that governs how we educate children in the Territory. But to do so, we have sought to identify the incongruences and weaknesses in the governing structure of the system which serve as obstacles for wholescale reforms. The final output of the initiative will be a web-based, interactive repository or Policy Map that will empower policymakers to make balanced and fully informed decisions. During the Systems Analysis phase of our Mapping Initiative, the Steering Committee is focusing on understanding the interconnectedness of each part of the system and on compiling and examining policies and standards that govern five specific educational priority areas: (1) student support systems, (2) instructional management which includes teacher quality and 21st Century curriculum standards, (3) facilities management, (4) funding, and (5) organizational design. The end-goal of the Foundation’s systems analysis is the creation of a web-based, user-friendly Policy Map that will overlay existing local educational policies with proven national and international best practices and model policies. The completed map will serve to provide local policy makers and educational stakeholders with a databank of all existing policies and current educational data. As a first-of-its-kind initiative, within the next two years, we hope this project will become a local and national model for facilitating whole system reform in any governmental instrumentality.

LEADING THE WAY...

PILOT: A TEACHING LABORATORY After 10 years of aggressive, ceaseless effort to transform the Territory's educational system and secure successful outcomes for our children, the St. Croix Foundation has drawn several critical conclusions about why we believe the Virgin Islands continues to struggle to improve the quality of education we are providing to the most vulnerable and important members of our Community.

iii

We have also drawn some strong conclusions about why America, as a whole, has been unable to make radical kinds of improvements in its educational system and consistently fails to keep pace with other industrialized countries around the world. With growing clarity about the inextricable link between a community’s educational system and its economic health through the work funded by the MSI, the Foundation has concluded that highly effective teachers represent the most critical factor in the overall health of educational systems and, in turn, the success of its students. In the near future, we will be unveiling our proposal for a teaching laboratory in partnership with the University of the Virgin Islands and other key stakeholders. The Lab will provide innovative teacher-training, instructional design and research as well as serve as a hub for educational excellence.

CAPACITY BUILDING In an effort to expose policy makers and key education stakeholders to national and international best practices, since 2010, our MSI has funded travel to national Innovation conferences. Local delegations have included members from the Senate Committee on Education and Workforce Development, the University of the Virgin Islands, the Workforce Investment Board and from the Department of Education: teachers, principals, and most recently the Commissioner of the Department of Education (2015). Over the next year, the Fund will support capacity-building symposiums which will convene local policymakers along with national and international thought-leaders around the issue of whole system reform, international best practices, and educational innovations.

COMMUNITY OUTREACH AND ENGAGEMENT As an extension of the Foundation’s 2014 "Education First!" editorial campaign, which urged citizens to elect candidates committed to making education their top priority, the MSI Fund will continue to support comprehensive campaigns focusing on a range of relevant issues surrounding education, from teacher preparation and student discipline to classroom management and parental engagement. As the leading civic advocate for radical educational transformation, the Foundation seeks to spur an even broader community-wide conversation about our collective moral obligation to ensure the highest quality of educational opportunities for ALL children.

For more information on the St. Croix Foundation for Community Development and the Model Schools Initiative, please contact us directly at 340.773.9898.

MSI Phase I Report Page 1

CHAPTER 1

Public Education Reform: “Whatever It Takes”

In the fall of 2005, St. Croix Foundation officially launched our Model Schools

Initiative (MSI) at one of our community’s junior high schools with the ultimate goal of

developing a strategic and collaborative approach to improve public education. In the

years since, we have supported replicable models of literacy-based academic programs

and instructional best practices in our local schools. Today, our Model Schools Initiative

represents a targeted, community-based educational venture through which the

Foundation has sought to address systemic problems in the Territory’s public education

system.

While much of our work was done behind the scenes, from the very first day of

our Initiative, the Foundation was given considerable access to our schools, to our

educators, and to our students. We spent four consecutive years witnessing up-close

and personal what so many in our community sit on the sidelines and pontificate about.

The end result of our on-the-ground efforts has ultimately been extraordinary insight into

what is working in our schools as well as what is plaguing them, based on both

experiential and quantitative data. In truth, as objective “outsiders,” the Foundation

began its journey into public education with no other agenda than to better understand

some of the root causes of the “failures” in our public schools and to, in turn, develop

ways to support them toward success.

Overall, our Model Schools Initiative has afforded us entrée into some of the

complex challenges that make far too many of our schools ineffectual and inadequate in

the 21st Century. On the flip side, however, we have also been wonderfully enlightened

and encouraged by the untold stories of success, which illustrate the potential our public

schools have to be truly innovative and highly effective1 in preparing our students for

successful lives beyond graduation.

As we now conclude the first stage of our Model Schools Initiative, the

Foundation has drafted this comprehensive close-out report that summarizes what we

have identified as our schools’ greatest assets as well as the most critical impediments

1 Sue Shannon and Pete Byslma (2007) of the Washington State’s Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) describe highly effective and high performing schools as those with the following 9 characteristics: “(1) Clear and Shared Vision and Purpose, (2) High Standards and Expectations for all students, (3) Effective School Leadership, (4) High Levels of Collaboration and Communication, (5) Curriculum, Instruction and Assessment Aligned with State Standards, (6) Frequent Monitoring of Teaching and Learning, (7) Focused Professional Development, (8) Supportive Learning Environment, (9) High Level of Family and Community Involvement” (Executive Summary, p. 6).


to large-scale reform. Our work has also uncovered unique opportunities for all

community stakeholders to collaboratively partner with our schools in ways that will

have maximum impact.

But, the most important message we want to leave behind is this: systemic public

educational excellence is within our reach, and rapid improvement is more readily

attainable than most people think. The caveat is that the pathway to real reform here in

the Virgin Islands is unquestionably more a matter of will and commitment than anything

else, and it is going to take great focus and fidelity on the part of every stakeholder to

make it a reality.

Why We Dared to Try

The surface answer for why the St. Croix Foundation even dared to delve into the

public education arena is quite simple: as a community foundation, we have always

believed that we must be responsive to emerging crises in our community. Today, the

current state of our public schools and of the young people they serve can be

considered nothing if not a crisis! The deeper draw for us, however, was that after

almost 20 years in existence and with a record of countless successful initiatives in the

areas of Community Revitalization, Economic Development, Public Safety, and Fiscal

Management, we realized with greater clarity that almost all roads surrounding our

community’s most pressing socio-economic problems lead back to Education.

That, of course explains the “why” behind our educational Initiative, but the “how”

to go about supporting our schools has been much more complicated. In actuality, our

foray into public education began and was sustained by a very basic yet nebulous

“whatever it takes” approach, wherein we supported our schools in any and all ways

necessary to achieve success. Whatever It Takes has indeed characterized how many

challenges are being overcome every day in chronically disadvantaged communities all

over the country. It is also the title of one of the most inspirational stories about public

education reform in Harlem, New York where Geoffrey Canada, CEO of the Harlem

Children’s Zone (also known as the Harlem Miracle), is pioneering a groundbreaking

roadmap for public education.

But, “whatever it takes” is more than a motto, or the title of an inspirational story.

In our work, our research, and throughout our network of educational partners, we have

found that real systemic-based public education reform is often the result of an

approach that accepts no excuses, expects only excellence, and does whatever it takes

to achieve the end goal of high academic achievement for all students.


As President Obama stated in his first speech to the nation, “Despite resources

that are unmatched anywhere in the world, we've let our grades slip, our schools

crumble, our teacher quality fall short, and other nations outpace us. What's at stake is

nothing less than the American dream.”2 We could not agree more.

The Stark Realities of Public Education in the Virgin Islands Prior to launching our Initiative, the Foundation spent several years sorting

through a mountain of data on our public school system as well as on “high-performing”

and “rapidly improving” public school models around the country. We also evaluated

empirical data regarding the flow of local donor dollars to our public schools and the

level of community-based support.

What we first noted was that most of our corporate donors were almost

exclusively contributing funds and resources to our elementary schools, believing (with

good reason) that the primary levels were the least overwhelming and the easiest

places to implement change. We also found that some of our largest corporations had

longstanding partnerships with our local high schools, providing them extraordinary

private sector resources. This left a huge gap in the support system, as St. Croix’s three

middle schools—plagued with a multitude of social and academic challenges—

remained undesirable to most donors.

The hard data we examined painted an even more compelling picture about the

academic and social realities of public school students. Some of our most gripping

findings were as follows:

According to the 2004 USVI Kids Count Data Book, in 2002, 93% of VI 8th

graders scored below proficient (grade level) in reading on the National

Assessment of Educational Progress. Only 4% of VI 8th graders scored

proficient in reading (p. 25).

From 2004-2005, trends for student dropout rates pointed to junior high school as

the gateway to success or failure with 7% of students dropping out in the 7th

grade, 9% dropping out in the 8th grade, 36% dropping out in the 9th grade, and

22% in the 10th grade (USVI Kids Count, 2006, p. 29).

2 President Barack Obama spoke to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in March of 2009. This specific quote and the context in which it appears can be found on page two of his speech in the New York Times.


44.6% of adults in our community over the age of 25 have no high school

diploma3.

And, from 2004-2005, 458 VI youth (per 100,000) were arrested for juvenile crimes

versus the US average of 276 (USVI Kids Count, p. 25) 4.

Armed with data, we decided to do something distinctly different from what we were

seeing in our community and had ourselves done in the past. We first deduced that poor

reading skills equated to poor learning skills, which directly contributes to students

falling through the cracks and out of the system.

We also made some critical decisions about our objectives and our target

population, opting to direct our focus and resources on the “neediest” schools in the St.

Croix District. We defined “neediest” as those schools with the most challenging student

demographics and lowest academic performance. Then we took a deep breath and

chose to hone in on what has historically been known as the most difficult student

population—middle school students—as our target group, with the goal of creating a

safety net for those students who were pouring out of our elementary schools

academically unprepared. Finally, we decided to keep our focus concentrated by

selecting one school at which to pilot our Initiative for a multi-year period. Our overall

strategy sought to not dilute our efforts and to capture as much useful data that would

support future plans to replicate our most successful programs.

Elena Christian Junior High (ECJH), on the island of St. Croix, became our pilot

school and the launchpad for our Model Schools Initiative. As one of three public junior

high schools on-island, historically known as “Little Vietnam,” ECJH was one of our

community’s most troubled schools. As reported in the school’s An Integrated School

Improvement Plan (2004), while Elena Christian had a seasoned faculty of

approximately 40 teachers and professional staff, as well as 23 support staff, it served

approximately 400 7th and 8th grade students, the majority of whom resided in public

housing communities (p. 3). Literacy diagnostics for the 2003-2004 school year also

indicated that greater than 85% of seventh graders at ECJH were reading below the

50th percentile on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS), an exam used for national

comparisons and benchmarks (p. 6).

3 The U.S. Census of Population and Housing (2000) reports that 20% of adults over 25 have less than a 9th grade education; another 22.6% have attained a 9-12 grade education but have not graduated from high school (p. 8).

4 While the Foundation focused on the most current data available, reports from previous years indicate that our students have not been achieving their potential for many years. Student dropout rates are a chronic issue as well: from 2002-2003, “Nearly half of youth age 18-19 do not have a high-school diploma (1,294 youth or 46.4%), an increase of 290 youth over 2002. There was also a two thirds increase in the number of youth age 18-19 who had not attained 9th grade: 189 in 2003, up from 113 youth in 2002” (USVI Kids Count, 2005, p. 32).


Model Schools Initiative Overview

With our research complete and having already established Literacy as the

Foundation’s primary educational focus area in years prior, we drafted a comprehensive

strategic plan with the goal of supporting literacy-based academic needs at ECJH. That

strategic plan outlined the following supports:

1. Literacy Remediation and Reinforcement Resources, chosen based on their

proven success in producing high-performing students, with the goal of

significantly increasing reading scores on annual VITAL5 exams;

2. Literacy-based Assessment Tools, to measure students’ performance in reading

in order to arm teachers with valuable data on their students, while also allowing

the Foundation to evaluate the efficacy of our programs;

3. Standardized Test Preparatory Resources in such content areas as: reading

comprehension, critical thinking, writing styles, IOWA test-prep, and general test-

taking skills;

4. Relevant, Educational Best Practices from successful national models that are

proven to enhance instructional strategies and organizational management.

In September of the 2005-2006 school year, we officially introduced our Initiative to

Elena Christian administrators. We knew we were taking a huge gamble by offering to

provide direct services to a public school—a path not commonly traversed in the world

of community foundations.

While we did consider more traditional (and safer) alternatives in our philanthropic

pursuits, such as writing checks and donating pencils and books, we rolled up our

sleeves instead and jumped into the trenches with teachers and students. We then got

to work to understand their challenges and to identify the most strategic approaches to

support the school, while also fulfilling the Foundation’s programmatic goals.

Over time, the Foundation expanded our Model Schools Initiative6 to address the

needs of the whole child (as well as the needs of beleaguered teachers) with targeted

incentive and professional development programs. We also committed a great deal of

time and effort to the issues of discipline and classroom management, in an attempt to

create a school culture that was truly conducive to teaching and learning.

5 VITAL stands for the Virgin Islands Territorial Assessment of Learning and is a standardized test designed specifically for students in the US Virgin Islands. It is administered to students at the end of every academic year.

6 For a comprehensive program history and overview on our MSI, contact the St. Croix Foundation at 340-773-9898.


18.2 19.7

47.1

15.7

13

55.1

2633.1

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

7th Grade

2005-06

7th Grade

2006-07

7th Grade

2007-08

7th Grade

2008-09

READING SCORE M ATH SCORE

While singularly focused on ECJH, we also soon came to understand that the school

did not exist in a vacuum. In 2006, at the urging of ECJHS’s principal and in an effort to

create a continuum of success, we made the crucial decision to reach back and capture

the 5th and 6th graders at Juanita Gardine Elementary School (JGES), Elena

Christian’s primary and lowest performing feeder school. The Foundation also made the

committment to dedicate a significant amount of resources to district-level initiatives, as

we sought to deepen local community engagement on the topic of public education

transformation.

At the start of each school year, as well as at year’s end, we worked with both ECJH

and Juanita Gardine to ascertain their programmatic priorities and goals and to evaluate

our programs. We also tirelessly worked to build a sense of trust and accountability

between our organization and our school partners, which at times meant that we had to

have some difficult conversations in order to find middle ground and clarify our own

priorities. We developed a “Quid Pro Quo / Memorandum of Understanding” that

established high standards of accountability for both the school and for ourselves, while

also formalizing the Foundation’s multi-year commitment to ECJH.

Each year, we made ongoing adjustments to our strategic plan to remain flexible and

responsive to emerging needs and shifting priorities with the objective of ensuring that

at all times the Foundation was addressing critical issues germane to Elena Christian.

With real collaboration and a great deal of day-to-day communication between the

Foundation and our pilot school (coupled with frequent updates and meetings with

district personnel), over the course of our Initiative, ECJH students made measurable,

steady gains on their VITAL tests. There were also shifts in school culture, as Elena

Christian transformed from an unstructured, wild, and sometimes violent campus to a

calmer and safer learning environment.

Scores from the Department of Education’s VITAL Report Card (2008), illustrate the

extraordinary gains ECJH students made in math and the steady, yet incremental gains

made in reading over the course of our Initiative (see Figures 1 and 2).

Figure 1:

2005 -2009 7th Grade

VITAL Exam Scores


Figure 2: 2005 -2009 8th Grade VITAL Exam Scores7

In addition to the academic gains, Elena Christian also saw dramatic reductions in discipline infractions over the course of our Initiative, as students and faculty became more focused on the business of teaching and learning. These gains are reflected in data from the USVI Department of Education Public School Discipline Report (2008) below:

Figure 3: 2008 Number of Incidents among St. Croix Junior High and High Schools8

7 Figures 1 and 2 were developed by the St. Croix Foundation from data in the Department of Education’s 2008 VITAL Report Card.

8 Figure 3 was developed by the St. Croix Foundation from graphed data in the Department of Education’s 2008 Public School Discipline Report (p. 5).

# of Incidents: St. Croix District, Junior High and High School

190

4

313

504

0

478

564

0

100

200

300

400

500

600

Arthur A.

Richards

Junior High

Elena L.

Christian

Junior High

John H.

Woodson

Junior High

Positive

Alternative

Education

St. Croix

Central High

St. Croix

Educational

Complex

High

29 28.431.2

41.8

28.4

49

36

56.3

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

8th Grade

2005-06

8th Grade

2006-07

8th Grade

2007-08

8th Grade

2008-09

READING SCORE M ATH SCORE


Transitioning Out of ECJH

At the beginning of the 2008-09 school year, after assessing the progress of our

Initiative and with many of our initial goals achieved, the Foundation decided to fulfill

one of our most important programmatic milestones. This ultimately entailed

transitioning out of our direct presence at EJCH. Knowing with certainty that our pilot

school had transformed from where we found it four years prior, at the end of that

school year we ended our on-the-ground work at Elena Christian. We remain optimistic

that it will remain on track to becoming the high-performing school we believe it can be.

As we close out the first phase of our Model Schools Initiative, the Foundation is

extraordinarily proud of all the accomplishments we have made at ECJH and at the

district-level9 as well. Having dedicated a large portion of our budget to fund district and

Territory-wide professional development activities, (a component of our Initiative we had

not initially planned for), we are deeply encouraged by the results. Most notable was the

success of our efforts at brokering a high impact partnership between the Department of

Education (DOE) and the International Center for Leadership in Education (ICLE)—one

that continues to this day.

As a leading organization committed to the issue of public education

transformation in the United States and worldwide, ICLE is currently exposing teachers

and district leaders throughout the Virgin Islands to real-life models of high-performing

schools, many of which have faced far greater socio-economic challenges than we are

facing here in the Virgin Islands.

In addition to our success with ICLE, our Model Schools Initiative also has led to

a special (and quite unexpected) national recognition when we were invited by the

National School Boards Association in 2009 to present our MSI story at their Annual

Conference in San Diego, California.

Of course, in addition to the many successes we have achieved, there were also

a great number of challenges faced throughout our MSI including, but not limited to: 1)

striving to forge a genuine partnership with the DOE; 2) maintaining our focus and

achieving our strategic objectives in the face of numerous district decisions which

directly impacted our Initiative and our pilot school, like the proposed closure of ECJH;

3) attempting to (re)build critical relationships following countless administrative

9 References to the Foundation’s expanded work at the “District level” and with the “District” refer to wide-scale, Territorial efforts to engage the Virgin Islands Department of Education’s administrative bodies (e.g. the Office of the Superintendent, Office of the Commissioner, Office of Curriculum and Assessment, and etc.) in community –based public education reform.


overhauls; and 4) building the necessary community awareness and support to finance

the Initiative’s programming.

Those were just some of our major challenges. There were indeed many more

obstacles that we faced on a daily basis. However, in our own assessment, none of the

uncomfortable experiences with which we contended altered our focus or our

commitment to support our public education system in meaningful ways that have long-

term impact. In our final analysis, it has been the challenges as much as our successes

that have solidified our resolve and our will to forge ahead and make a real difference.

The Cost of Reform

As we now reflect on the first four years of the MSI, so much of what the

Foundation has brought to the table, beyond money, has served to fill real voids and

skill gaps in our schools. Things like strategic planning and strategic implementation,

building and nurturing effective private-public partnerships, leveraging resources, and

encouraging meaningful community engagement were, in many ways, the most

important contributions we made. But, access to the flexible funding which the

Foundation provided was unquestionably an important value-added component of the

Initiative for our public school partners.

In total, throughout our Model Schools Initiative to date, the St. Croix

Foundation expended in excess of $300,000, exclusive of staff time, to support

our public schools. Although we did reach out to numerous entities in the public

sector, it is important to note that all dollars raised and expended for this Initiative came

from the private sector10.

It must also be noted that the final tally on our expenditures do not include many

of the donations which some members of our very generous corporate stakeholder

community made directly to Elena Christian and other schools in the district, including a

$100,000 state-of-the-art computer lab and technology center, donated to ECJH by

HOVENSA oil refinery.

We are also incredibly proud to report that because of a growing level of support

from private donors, who believe deeply in the mission of our MSI (and our community-

10 As a small, un-endowed community foundation, our donor-derived contributions have ultimately represented a significant investment in our community. In reality though, it is a small sum, taking into consideration the tremendous successes we achieved in relation to how much most people think it costs to achieve large-scale reform in our schools.


based, collaborative approach to reform), we are in the very early stages of building a

million dollar educational endowment in support of public school students. That single

accomplishment is a monumental one for our organization and represents the amazing

amount of faith our donors have placed in the Foundation and the work we are doing.

On the whole, we have learned some valuable lessons through our Model

Schools Initiative that will inform all of our future decisions. But as we move forward, we

must first ensure that our programming and our partnerships meet the highest

standards of accountability in respect for all of our donors, who continue to entrust us

with their money and their philanthropic goals.

As we put the finishing touches on the next phase of our Initiative, the

Foundation is, today, admittedly impatient about the pace of educational reform in our

community and contends daily with a self-imposed sense of urgency to spur more rapid

change in our public schools. But, we are also increasingly assured that we, along with

all other community stakeholders, have a rightful place at the table in the Territory’s

pursuit of a high-quality public education system. This will ultimately require the kind of

major paradigm shift that is a critical part of real reform and involves the mobilization

and coalescing of a critical mass of stakeholders in a groundswell push for change.

Now, more than ever before, we know that the success and well-being of our young

people is the single greatest insurance for the economic and social welfare of our entire

community. It is with this understanding that the Foundation’s Model Schools Initiative

was conceived over five years ago. Today, we have prepared this document with the

goal of building a general community-based road-map to show how average citizens

and corporate stakeholders can advocate for and collectively support our public schools

to success—whatever it takes!


CHAPTER 2

Our Children—Who are They, Who Can They Be?

There should be no doubt that at the core of the St. Croix Foundation’s

commitment to supporting our public education system is, of course, our children.

Having provided enrichment opportunities to youth for many years through targeted

scholarship programs, the Foundation has become acutely aware of the amazing

potential that lies in every child. But the reality for today’s young people, when one

makes a holistic assessment of their lives, is that every day in the Territory our social

services and public safety agencies are forced to deal with many of the failures of our

educational system.

Those realities initially led us to naively presume that all of the children being

served by our public schools could be easily lumped into one statistical grouping.

Instead, what we found was that our public school students were incredibly diverse,

spanning a vast range of individual competencies and family backgrounds. In truth, one

can only stand in awe of what our schools are asked to accomplish in the way of

educating (and nurturing) them all and doing so effectively—indeed a daunting and

high-stakes task. It is the single most important aspect of our public schools that make

them so incredibly special; they must take every child, regardless of their competency or

capability!

Overall, what we have learned about our students was very positive—that many

of them are extremely talented and curious. They are gregarious and charismatic. They

have an amazing capacity to move from one completely unrelated subject to the next—

and they can do it faster and remember more than most adults do on our best day. Also,

just like most children of their generation (known as Millennials), our students of today

were born and raised in the Digital Age and have never known a time without computers

or cell phones. Yet, one major consequence of our young people’s gift for navigating the

Digital Age is our educators’ most significant challenge: keeping students motivated and

engaged by the same chalkboards, textbooks, and teaching strategies of twenty or even

ten years ago.

Even beyond the impact of the Digital Age, the average child today has an

enormously different home life than those of just one generation past. According to the

2000 Census of Population and Housing (2003), 54% of our children under the age of

18 are living in households headed by a single mother, and the majority of those are

living in poverty (p. 3). The statistics for how our children are faring inside our schools is

equally distressing. Based on 2005-06 data from the Virgin Islands Department of

Education (DOE), the USVI Kids Count Data Book (2006) reports that 82% of 7th


graders were reading below grade level and less than 30% of 11th graders were

proficient in reading (p. 27).

Moreover, while the DOE admittedly does not have reliable data collection

methods in place to capture dropout rates accurately, the 2000 Census reported that in

the Virgin Islands, of our 16-19 year olds, 32.2% of young people were not enrolled in

school, were not graduates, and were not employed11. Some believe the statistics to be

much grimmer with close to 50% of our public school students not graduating from

school.

Whatever the real numbers, every day we spent at our pilot school, Elena

Christian Junior High School, the Foundation remained acutely aware that

approximately half of the students we met and interacted with would potentially not

make it past the 10th grade. We were, as a result, constantly grappling with a self-

imposed sense of urgency and obligation to try to stem the tide and turn the trend

around.

Having made the deliberate decision to focus on the middle school level, we

knew that with each 7th grade class that entered ECJH we had only two years to

support administrators and teachers in making the kind of positive impact that could

potentially transform a student’s’ life and encourage them to stay in school.

But first, we felt compelled to gain some first-hand insight into how our children

were fairing beyond the statistics. During the first year of our Initiative, the Foundation

actually spent a considerable amount of time visiting many schools within the district

(something we strongly recommend for every committed education stakeholder)

seeking to translate the data we had researched into real insight about who our

students were.

Some of the observations we made on the surface served to illuminate actual

skill gaps, which we believe make educational reform here in the Virgin Islands a

particularly daunting challenge. In general, we found that a large number of students

exhibited the following:

Painfully poor communication skills (i.e. limited vocabulary as well as poor

grammar, speech, and writing skills);

11 The 2000 U.S. Census of Population and Housing: Summary Population and Housing Characteristic for the U.S. Virgin Islands (2003) indicates that 18.1% of our 16-19 year olds are neither enrolled in school or graduates; and 14.1% of our 16-19 year olds are not employed or in the labor force (p. 10).


Disconnectedness from learning and achievement;

Fearlessness of failure;

Extraordinary confidence even in the face of their academic deficiencies;

Limited exposure to the world beyond their immediate environments;

Limited understanding of the concept or importance of college as a viable option

after graduation.

Engaging Students in Learning by Building Relationships

With all of our empirical and statistical data in hand, the Foundation

immediately sought to prioritize the complex challenges facing our public school

students. We soon realized that in order for schools to teach students effectively,

educators first had to gain their attention and their trust—by engaging them and by

building meaningful relationships with them. Relying on guidance from organizations like

the International Center for Leadership in Education (ICLE), we quickly came to

understand the degree to which the students of today require different structure,

guidance, and skills than students of the past.

According to ICLE, the 3 new R’s in 21st Century education are Rigor, Relevance

and Relationships12, with significant emphasis placed on the latter. Based on data

collected from hundreds of successful public schools, ICLE contends that while the

relevance of academic curriculum to the real world is the vehicle for greater rigor in 21st

Century instruction, relationships are oftentimes the spark that enables students to

become (and stay) engaged and motivated to learn.

ICLE’s data is supported by numerous other academic resources. Authors and

educators Skinner and Belmont (1993) report in Motivation in the Classroom: Reciprocal

Effects of Teacher Behavior and Student Engagement Across the School Year, that

“children who are more engaged in school do in fact earn higher grades, score higher

12 ICLE’s Rigor and Relevance Framework, based on Bloom’s Taxonomy, lists the characteristics students show as they acquire and master knowledge necessary in the 21st Century. Through this Framework, ICLE illustrates that knowledge acquisition requires rigorous, relevant (to the modern world) instruction. But, to achieve a high level of student success, there must first be a strong and nurturing student-teacher Relationship. For more information on ICLE 3 R’s visit their website at http://www.leadered.com. An overview on the theory, practice and success of the three new Rs can also be found at www.lvbep.org/Portals/0/McNulty%20aasa%20feb%2009.pdf.


on standardized tests of achievement, and show better personal adjustment to school”

(p. 2).

Establishing relationship building as one of our initial priorities, the Foundation

attempted to support teachers and administrators in meeting the challenge of student

engagement. We accomplished this, in large part, by connecting ECJH with our

stateside public school partners, who guided them in developing innovative programs

and strategies for motivating students and keeping them excited about school.

One of those partners, Principal Clara Sale-Davis, from Freeport Intermediate

Middle School, located in a small border town of Texas, reported that one of her most

important questions when interviewing prospective middle school teachers was, “Can

you sing or dance?” The answer was, not surprisingly, most often a resounding ‘no,’ to

which she always replied, “Will you try?” Clara’s reasoning, while unconventional, was

that in order to reach middle school students (in particular), teachers had to build

meaningful relationships with them—and that sometimes meant letting down their hair

and loosening their ties to reach those hardest-to-reach students.

ECJH teachers responded well to Freeport’s example, immediately organizing

Monday morning assemblies, wherein teachers would conduct somber funeral

processions, carrying cardboard cut-outs of illegal (overused) words that could no

longer be spoken or written on campus, such as “nice” or “good.” Upon placing the

illegal words in a make-shift coffin where they were to remain “buried” for the rest of the

school year, a jubilant musical celebration would usher in a large-screen video

presentation of alternative words that could be used instead. ECJH’s weekly assemblies

were also accompanied by audio-visual PowerPoint presentations of the week in review

that were created, in part, by students.

While such strategies may seem slightly unconventional to some, there was an

amazing response from students as they became increasingly engaged and looked

forward to seeing what their teachers had in store for them at the start of each school

week. Students’ immediate response to their innovative efforts turned out to be all the

proof ECJH teachers needed to understand the real impact of engagement. And,

students, in turn, became more focused on learning as they started correcting their

teachers and peers throughout the day for accidentally uttering illegal words: proof

positive that out-of-the-box strategies are not only effective, but are a pre-requisite for

21st Century students in 21st Century schools.

Later on in our Initiative, when teachers raised the issue of the chronic numbers

of students who were failing to complete homework assignments, the Foundation

worked with school administrators to introduce a comprehensive Rewards Program.

Instead of developing a solely punitive response to this mounting problem, we offered


students incentives for positive behaviors, both individually, as well as for the collective

success of their respective teams and grades.

Once again, the model came from a stateside public school partner in Louisiana

(Plain Dealing Middle School) that was designated as a nationally recognized “Rapidly

Improving School” in 2008. Quite interestingly, Plain Dealing realized soaring academic

gains in one school year after implementing a comprehensive incentive program, called

“PAWS” that is named after the school’s mascot, the Lion (ironically akin to ECJH’s

“Simba” mascot). As one of several highly successful model programs the Foundation

introduced at Elena Christian, “PAWS” is proving each day that our schools have to be

innovative to keep students engaged and interested in school and academic

achievement13.

Reading Counts: But So Does Speech and Writing, Too…

Although student engagement became an important part of our Initiative, literacy

was, from the start, our programmatic focus. Always mindful of the critical reading

deficiencies in our public school students, the Foundation committed the largest part of

its budget and efforts to supporting proven reading enrichment resources for students.

But, first we had to navigate around one major obstacle—getting on the same page with

some faculty members about the gravity of the language deficiencies students were

exhibiting.

In actuality, throughout our Initiative, the Foundation continued to stress to our

education partners the importance of preparing students for the real workforce. Being

acutely aware of the ongoing burden our business community contends with every day

because of the skill gaps of employees and prospective employees, we placed

considerable focus on speech and writing as a critical extension of literacy skill

development.

Recognizing that far too many in our local employment pool do not have the

basic communication skills to be considered employable, one specific recommendation

we made on an ongoing basis was the need for a school-wide commitment to literacy,

both inside and out of every classroom, amongst teachers, staff, administrators, in

addition to students. We felt certain then, and continue to believe today, that without

significant attention placed on how students and faculty communicate (i.e. speak and

13 For more details on the original PAWS program from Plain Dealing Middle School or our modified PAWS Program for ECJH, contact the St. Croix Foundation.


write), it will be impossible to significantly increase reading scores and prepare students

for the world beyond our schools.

Today, at ECJH, a comprehensive school-wide commitment to literacy is still in

the process of being institutionalized, and there are earnest plans in place and

actionable steps being taken in the right direction. The Foundation is also optimistic

about a growing focus by the district toward comprehensive and strategic literacy skill

development. Our hope is that this focus will be multi-dimensional, occurring across

curriculums and always connected to the real world skills our students will need to

master in order to succeed after school and in life.

Who Can They Become?

Overall, the Foundation has been struck by the degree to which all of the data,

and the stories, and the statistics we came across in our research indicated what was

happening to our young people—but it did not paint a true picture of who they are. We

now clearly understand that no matter what adjective we use to describe our children or

the data source we use to group them… they are our future. Their potential is our

potential. The bottom line for every one of our students is very simple: they have an

untold amount of talent and intellect that we, as a community, have failed to tap into—to

their (and our own) detriment.

Our children are our community’s future, and it is for this reason that we have

employed a “whatever it takes” approach to all of our programming. We recognize that

the stakes are so incredibly high and the task before us so very urgent. In essence, if

our community continues to “discuss” and to “plan” without real fidelity to implement, we

risk losing yet another generation of children.

For our part, the Foundation’s next steps will include ongoing development of

targeted programs and initiatives in support of our young people. This past summer, we

fulfilled one long-term goal by launching our first Youth Advisory Council (YAC), which is

comprised of junior high and high school students from our public schools. Presently,

our YAC members are researching some of the root causes of the challenges facing

youth in our local community. The overarching goal of their research is to arm them with

the necessary data they need to inform their plans when developing grantmaking

programs that will address those issues.

YAC members will work closely with the Foundation’s Education Committee to

solicit funding proposals from youth-inspired programs or projects in our community.

They will also play an active role in evaluating the success of each funded project, while

developing critical real-world skill-sets by designing their programmatic agendas,


budgets, timelines, benchmarks, and media strategies for reporting to the community on

their efforts.

In one of their first major assignments, YAC members had to survey their peers

and then compile a list of the most pressing issues facing young people in our

community as well as possible solutions for addressing those needs. Some of their

responses actually made us pause for a long moment, not because we hadn’t identified

the same issues on our own, but because we realized how profoundly naïve we had

been in underestimating the degree of self-awareness that our young people possess.

Among the expected responses, like violence and peer pressure, students also

identified issues like, “the need for self-confidence; a lack of mentors and positive

influences; not being encouraged on the right decisions; not being steered in the right

direction; lack of motivation; and a corrupt society,” as major issues they and their peers

contend with.

Overwhelmingly, YAC peers identified the need for mentoring, encouragement,

and motivation as what they need from us most! The Foundation is committed to

meeting that need, while also empowering our young people to become active

participants in our community’s collective efforts to secure successful and productive

futures for them.


CHAPTER 3

Teachers: Our Greatest Assets and Impending Liabilities

Unlike other well-intended community-based educational endeavors, the St.

Croix Foundation’s Model Schools Initiative (MSI) has afforded us incredible access to

many of our community’s schools and to its teachers. For over four years, we worked

inside classrooms, side-by-side with teachers. We sat in on teacher team meetings, and

we walked hallways and lunched with teachers. We also traveled with them to

educational conferences and wept with them through trying times and in times of great

triumph. With every step we have taken, we have been astounded by what we have

found, both the good and the bad, and we have come to understand why teachers are

the single greatest assets and impending liabilities in our public schools.

Before delving into the incredibly sensitive issue of our community’s public school

teachers, we must first admit that the St. Croix Foundation approached this aspect of

our Model Schools Initiative with a great number of prejudices and assumptions,

believing we would find large-scale apathy and, sadly, ineptitude. Then, with all of those

biases in tow, we strategically structured our Initiative in such a way that we would have

limited contact with teachers. In truth, the Foundation entered into our partnership with

Elena Christian Junior High School (ECJH) with one primary objective: to introduce and

support programs that would improve student literacy skills.

While prepared to meet many challenges, like insufficient textbooks and

inadequate technological resources, we never fully calculated how greatly the success

of our Initiative would hinge on teachers. Very quickly, however, we learned that we

could have offered ECJH access to the best resources and all the funding in the world,

and in the end we would have made no true and lasting difference without the

knowledge, passion, commitment, and partnership of teachers.

In order to provide some context to our first real introduction to public school

teachers, it helps to draw a picture of what the first year of our MSI was like. Indeed,

after the very first week of the launch of our Initiative, the Foundation’s programming

was jolted off-schedule, where it remained for the duration of the 2005-06 school year,

following the announcement that John H. Woodson Junior High School would have to

be closed due to mold.

By St. Croix school district mandate, both Woodson and ECJH were

subsequently forced to share Elena Christian’s campus in an oppressive double-

session, which reduced the school day by approximately two hours and often times

much more. For ECJH teachers, the academic impact of the double-session meant that

quality instructional time was a premium when it existed at all.


The social implications of the merge bordered on inhumane, with teachers and

administrators forced to give up their desks, their classrooms, and their parking

spaces—in essence, they gave up their school in a rigid rotating schedule of musical

chairs that would have challenged the most tolerant and patient of individuals.

Throughout that year, in the midst of the disruption, ECJH teachers showed up

every day, went to their classrooms, and did their best to support their students. Despite

numerous promises that Woodson would be re-opened before the school year was out,

teachers persevered and spent an entire year trying to cram into half a day the

instruction and tutelage of a full day.

In an age where an increasing number of school districts are expanding their

school days and academic year, our pilot school saw a dramatic reduction in theirs. Yet,

teachers kept coming to school, struggling each day to keep warring factions of

Woodson and Elena students separate from each other during transition periods, while

also trying to meet local and federal academic mandates.

Then, in full climax to the tumultuous year they had endured, at the very end of

the school year, ECJH teachers had to suffer through an all-out campus-wide riot that

left over 30 students in police custody and the campus looking like it had weathered a

category 4 cyclone.

Through it all, Foundation staff went to school every day (along with a handful of

other community groups) to support Elena Christian the best way we could, fully

cognizant that teachers were simply too exhausted from what they were being

subjected to daily (outside of the classroom) to be truly effective inside. We made little

headway in achieving our own goal of full programmatic implementation, but we hung in

there with teachers while much of the entire community remained disturbingly quiet

about the chaos teachers and students were enduring.

In many ways, we became one of the only connections teachers had to the

community outside of the school and, in turn, those teachers became the foundation of

our Initiative. Had it not been for them (and for the children) we most likely would have

terminated the entire project that first year. Instead, we made the decision to work

harder, to retool our strategic plan, and to allow for greater focus on, and support for

teachers.


It’s the Teacher, It’s the Teacher, It’s the Teacher

What we want the community to know is how many of our teachers spend each

day in total isolation, dealing with disadvantaged, often times ill-mannered students (and

parents), not to mention the crippling bureaucracy that can snuff out the motivation of

the most energized professional.

In actuality, many of the educators we have met throughout our public schools

have a real passion for pedagogy and for children. We witnessed many examples of

that passion and purpose over the four years of our MSI: like the math teacher who

wept when he learned he had led his students to a 20 point gain on their VITALs in one

school year; or consider the entire group of ECJH faculty members who gathered,

without pay, for nighttime professional development workshops to discuss curriculum,

policy, and academic interventions. Administrators were there too, serving as

babysitters for their children while faculty teams worked well into the night. We also

heard stories of teachers who maintained small savings accounts to buy uniforms and

new underwear for their most needy students at the beginning of each school year.

In total, there were many extraordinary teachers that we met at ECJH and at

schools throughout the Territory—teachers who embody the nobility of the profession

through their acts of selflessness and dedication. They are unquestionably the greatest

assets in our public schools because they are the one constant. While administrators

and students come and go, sometimes in rapid succession, teachers are the long-term

caretakers, serving as griots of each school’s history and culture, and the foundation

upon which the success of our student’s academic achievement rests.

Now, although our teachers have never been paid what they deserve (in our

opinion), the sad fact is that to reach the student of today, our teachers must be experts

(or at least be willing to be) at more than just their core subjects. They are expected to

be adept at using a wide variety of new technologies; to keep up with popular culture; to

understand changing language and ideals; and to be willing to spend many personal

hours preparing new lessons and researching new teaching methods. On top of all of

this, they must also contend with the pressures of a bad economy, “manic” students,

and a general lack of meaningful support from their superiors and the community at-

large, all the while being forced to be both parent and teacher for many students.

As President Obama (2009) stated in one of his first speeches on education, “It's

time to start rewarding good teachers, and stop making excuses for bad ones” (p. 2).

We also strongly believe that in order for our community to walk the talk about the

importance of our children and of education, our teachers—our good teachers—must be

elevated to higher stature and prominence matched with higher pay that is

unequivocally married to the highest expectations.


The Impact of Bad Teachers

Of course, on the flip side of the tremendous contributions our teachers make in

educating our children, there are also some critical deficiencies that require the diligent

focus and attention of every public education stakeholder. From the very beginning of

our Initiative, the Foundation quickly began to observe performance patterns and

morale issues spread throughout most school faculties that we came into contact with,

to include:

A pervasive use of the Union Contract or “Blue Book” as a guard against new

ideas or personal accountability;

Extraordinarily low expectations (for administrators and most disturbingly for

students);

Resistance to the use of technology;

A predisposition toward mediocrity;

A propensity for blaming “others”, (i.e. administrators, parents, funding shortages,

and etc.) for poor student performance;

And a general, at times alarming, lack of professionalism and respect for

authority.

The International Center for Leadership in Education (ICLE), a nationally and

internationally renowned institute focused on public school reform, reported the same

national assessment of teachers that we observed locally. ICLE President, Dr. Willard

Daggett, asserted in a 2007 presentation given on St. Croix that based on his research

and experience, every school generally has three types of teachers:

1. The Lunatic Fringe, who never heard an idea they didn’t like;

2. The Skeptics, who first want to know where the support will come from and;

3. The Nay-Sayers, who say “this too shall pass,” believing no change is the

best change14.

14 Dr. Daggett has identified these three groups in many of his formal presentations at conferences and workshops throughout the nation and internationally. This includes three local conferences held in the US Virgin Islands in 2007 and 2008 that were sponsored by the St. Croix Foundation. For information on these presentations, you may contact the Foundation directly.


Although we only observed a few examples of the latter group, the Foundation

was indeed privy to a few shocking, yet isolated, examples of gross incompetence and

negligence. Armed with that insight, we now understand, first-hand, how bad teachers

(many of whom have been in the system for decades) can ensure whole-scale collateral

damage by de-motivating and demoralizing generations of students in our public

schools.

Undoubtedly, ineffective teachers are a huge part of the challenge that lies

before every effort to improve the quality of public schools. But, the arduous task of

filtering them from the system is inextricably tied to the even greater challenge of

building a sufficient pool of high-quality teachers, particularly here in the Territory.

In truth, the seldom discussed reality in our school system is that far too many of

our teachers are indeed homegrown products of our own public education system. One

need only consider that 84% of the University of the Virgin Islands’ freshmen class is

required to take remedial courses in language arts and math to understand how

insidious and daunting the challenge before us is (La Fleur, 2009, p. 4).

Now, while it may be of no consolation, we are not alone. At present, states

throughout the country are afflicted with the same powerlessness and costliness that

our local district administrators experience when attempting to create a greater density

of good teachers, while also removing bad ones from their schools.

In a 2008 article from the Center for Union Facts entitled Protecting Bad

Teachers, the authors provided a list of states and cities confronted with the vexing

issue of labor unions protecting bad teachers: in Dallas, only 0.78% of tenured teachers

are terminated annually; in Illinois (not including Chicago), two of 95,000 teachers are

terminated annually—where it costs $219,504 to fire just one bad teacher. In Los

Angeles, eleven out of 43,000 teachers are considered for termination, and in New York

City only ten out of 55,000 (p. 1).

In the end, Dr. Willard Daggett’s words ring most true on the matter of teacher

accountability: in public education, “When the interests of adults supersede the

interests of children, our children always lose” (2007). We sincerely hope that as

our community moves closer toward real educational reform, in all cases wherein critical

decisions have to be made about our public schools and the educators who serve them,

our children will always win.


Mentor, Motivate, and Move Out of the Way: Leveraging Professional Development

Today, the Foundation is well aware that raising student achievement is a

complicated issue with many variables at play as well as many key stakeholders

involved (including policy makers, commissioners, principals, parents, and the students

themselves). But, the bottom line is that whatever social, economic, or political changes

occur around our schools, when the door closes, what happens inside each classroom

is all about the teacher.

Even in the face of the grim realities about our public schools, and despite the

bureaucracy that often times undermines efforts to demand greater accountability from

all of our educators, the Foundation sincerely believes there is a solid core of great

teachers and enough “okay” teachers who may simply need targeted, individualized

professional development to get good.

As we now prepare for the next phase of our Initiative, we are actually quite

optimistic about the future, as a majority of the teachers we came into contact with

seemed to be right there in the middle: with the potential to be good, even great, yet not

entirely meeting that potential.

Overall, what we have learned over the four years of our MSI is that without a

teacher’s motivation to learn and to then pass on that knowledge to their students and

colleagues, little long-term impact is generally gained from the conventional, cookie-

cutter professional development (PD) training currently offered by the district. As we

saw on so many occasions at ECJH, passion can be so powerful a force that it can

inspire teachers throughout a school to truly own their school’s vision for reform and to

pursue their own professional development training—without mandatory decrees from

administrators. From our viewpoint, we believe that meaningful PD cannot be

mandated. It must be inspired!

At a time when information is changing at warp speed and technological

advances dominate our lives, most educators across the nation can travel by car and

across state lines in order to observe innovative instructional strategies and models of

success. Our teachers, however, are severely handicapped by the geographic isolation

of our island community. More frequently than we had originally expected, we

continually met local teachers throughout the district (some who have been in the

system for over 20 years) who had never traveled off-island for training.

As we sought to provide local educators with first-hand models of public

education success stories, the Foundation redirected funds toward professional


development, sponsoring ECJH faculty visits to stateside schools that are succeeding

against great odds. In 2008, we funded two seasoned educators’ week-long visit to a

high-performing public school in Freeport, Texas. The impact of that single experience

on those teachers (one of whom was a school administrator) was, in one word,

profound.

By simply seeing a public school, which despite severe challenges had engaged

its students with high-quality instructors and relevant educational curriculum, our

educators returned invigorated, inspired—and daunted by the realization of how far we

really have to go in the VI to attain a similar level of success. In follow-up discussions

with both educators about their visit, they admitted that they had never seen such high-

quality instruction before.

Now, it is important to keep in mind that the school our educators visited was

located in a small, smelly, refinery-ridden border town, with predominantly minority

(Mexican and Black) students. The school, in actuality, faced many more challenges

than we have here in the Virgin Islands as they strived to close a vast achievement gap

in a town rife with gang activity and pervasive poverty. Yet, students at Freeport were

not just surviving, they were thriving. From the minute our educators walked through

the gates of the school, all they observed from the beginning of the day until the end

was structure, soaring expectations of excellence for all, high-quality instruction in every

classroom and, at the helm, strong, competent leadership.

We continue to believe that by exposing teachers and administrators to real-life

models of success like Freeport and by connecting them with a network of high-

performing schools, our Territory can more effectively and expeditiously move their

school improvement efforts forward.

The Foundation remains committed to bolstering its offerings to schools with

more direct support for public school teachers. As part of our new MSI strategy, we also

intend to provide more targeted professional development resources to teachers

including some non-instructional based, business tracks with the goal of developing real

world workplace skills—for both teachers and administrators.

Ultimately, by providing teachers with some of the tools they need to be effective

in the classroom, by advocating on their behalf, and then by demanding the highest

standards of them for educating our children, our community can collectively begin

taking some decisive steps toward systemic reform.


CHAPTER 4

The Real Deal about Infrastructure and Resources in our Public Schools

Because of the St. Croix Foundation’s role as a conduit of donor funds, over the

years, we have witnessed (and sadly, albeit infrequently, participated in) the

expenditure of money and time in ineffective places and for ineffectual things in our

public schools. It is an ongoing balancing act for most community foundations: how to

keep donors happy, while also ensuring that their funds are being directed toward real

needs in ways that will have real impact. In the very early stages of developing our

Model Schools Initiative, we knew that sustaining just that balance would inevitably be

one of our greatest challenges and an important goal.

An early test came in 2004, just one year prior to the launch of our Initiative,

when a generous EDC firm agreed to partner with the Foundation to adopt one of our

local high schools. We spent countless hours touring the campus and meeting with

administrators to identify the most critical needs at the school. When all was said and

done, the school pleaded and the donor conceded to repair… bathrooms!

Despite the vast academic needs of students and teachers, we agreed to utilize

precious donor dollars to completely gut and retrofit one girls’ bathroom to make it ADA

(Americans with Disabilities Act) compliant. At the request of the school’s principal, the

Foundation also agreed to acid-wash graffiti off the walls and stalls of 13 other

bathrooms on the school’s campus.

Needless to say,

long before the project

was completed we were

all deeply troubled by

what we had done by

expending $25,000 that

could have been

leveraged several times

over to address

immediate academic

needs. To this day, we

believe we led a donor down a path that, in essence, relieved our local Department of

Education (DOE) from their obligatory responsibility— to address basic infrastructure

needs. We were, nonetheless, relieved to learn that the project had ironically resolved

one major issue (i.e. handicap accessibility), which Middle States Association of

Colleges and Schools, the Territory’s accreditation body, had identified as one of many

deficiencies prohibiting the school’s full accreditation.

Dirty toilets and wasted opportunities: Old toilets and bathroom fixtures at a local high school

(center) were refurbished (at left and right) at a cost of over $25,000.


In the end, that singular experience taught the Foundation some profound

lessons that have subsequently informed how we guide and advise donors who are

interested in providing resources and other supports to our public schools. In fact, we

may be one of only a handful of small non-profits in the Territory that consistently steers

donors (and their dollars) away from projects which we believe will not have lasting

impact or the level of accountability necessary for success. We simply feel too strongly

about the urgency of the most critical, instructional-based needs and the importance of

synergy in how private sector resources are used to address them.

In 2005, as we were putting the finishing touches on our MSI strategic plan, the

Foundation drew upon our “bathroom experience” a year earlier as we made the firm

commitment to not direct any funds toward infrastructure projects. Admittedly, the facility

that houses our pilot school, Elena Christian Junior High (ECJH), was built in 1989 and

is one of the newest school plants in the Territory (relatively speaking), although the

structure is under constant assault from sea blast and a general lack of maintenance.

Still, at no time since the inception of our Initiative did we ever give more than a

moment’s mention to structural issues at Elena Christian, or at any other school we

partnered with. Though much of the discussion about public schools in our community

almost always begins and ends with the poor physical condition of our school facilities,

very little of the research we have done and the experiences we have had point to

infrastructure as an inhibitor to student achievement.

In fact, according to the Alliance for Excellent Education, in their report How

Does the United States Stack Up? (2008), “In some of the countries that are now

surpassing the U.S. in academic performance, students don’t have even a

fraction of the basic resources and amenities we often take for granted” (p. 1-2).

This is, of course, no excuse for the lack of performance of our school districts in

ensuring that our students are provided with safe and clean facilities in which to learn.

But, it should not (and we believe it cannot) be an excuse for what is happening (or not

happening) inside our classrooms in the way of quality instruction.

Either way one looks at it, we believe the responsibility for what our schools look

like aesthetically, as well as how well they serve the basic needs of students and

educators, must become the primary function of someone other than our school

Principals.

Our experience has shown us that district and executive-level leaders must find

more effective, economical, and long-term solutions to address the crumbling

infrastructure of our public schools. One plausible step toward effectively meeting this

challenge collaboratively and as a community, may be to ask those in the private sector,

who tend to be more adept at managing and maintaining assets, for guidance and


support in developing practical, tactical plans of action. We believe that stronger

partnerships between our schools and the private sector may ultimately provide real

solutions to this longstanding problem, by offering the flexibility and bold innovation that

is not typically inherent in highly bureaucratic systems.

Instructional Resource Gaps: Myth vs. Reality

Once again, based on our high school bathroom experience and after listening to

all of the discourse on the airwaves and in legislative sessions about the instructional

deficiencies in our schools, when we launched our Initiative we fully expected to find

significant resource deficiencies at our pilot school. Instead, what we found was quite to

the contrary: the glaring shortages we had heard about were simply not there! In fact,

we were shocked by how many resources were actually available to teachers and

students.

Not only were there more computers and white boards, along with a whole host

of other technological resources than we could have ever imagined, but we also found

many of the same relevant academic programs that were already in use at some of the

high-performing stateside schools we had researched. In direct refutation of what we

had heard “on the street,” the DOE had indeed been utilizing a large share of the federal

dollars that pour into the Territory to equip teachers and school administrators with high-

quality instructional resources.

But there is a catch: while the DOE had procured some proven and effective

resources for our schools, we found countless examples of poor follow-through in

ensuring that those resources were actually being introduced and then implemented

effectively. It must be noted that the DOE does dedicate significant funding toward

teacher training in the utility of these programs, but not always accompanied by

strategic plans for implementation, or the requisite oversight of instructional integration

and evaluation. There are, ultimately, numerous failure points and performance gaps

along the way. But the plus side is, very simply, most of the resources our schools need

to be successful are already there.

Upon making the surprising discovery of the wealth of resources available in our

schools, the Foundation quickly realized that the most effective way to support our pilot

school was to assist by leveraging existing resources for maximum impact—something

we do exceptionally well as a small, un-endowed non-profit organization. We spent the

duration of our Initiative working with administrators and teachers to establish strategic

‘game-plans’ for ensuring that existing resources had the broadest impact on academic

instruction.


One of our first tests on how to maximize resources arose in the early part of our

Initiative upon identifying the Scholastic Reading Counts (SRC) and Reading Inventory

(SRI) Programs as the core pieces of our literacy offerings to the school15. As individual

components of a more comprehensive (and highly acclaimed) Read 180 Program, the

SRC and SRI Programs were expensive resources that the Foundation knew could cost

upwards of $25,000—money we did not have at the time. But, we believed so strongly

in the program, based on its proven success at other schools, that we were committed

to finding the funding.

First, however, we met with every member of ECJH’s Language Arts Department

to determine their interest and commitment to utilizing the SRI and SRC programs as

part of their Language Arts curriculum. All expressed their interest. To our surprise and

encouragement, we immediately learned that Elena Christian had already fully

implemented the Read 180 Program in one remedial resource classroom serving 40

“struggling readers” (even though the program was comprised of individual components

with the capacity and design to serve all 400 students at the school.)

Assuming the school had procured a modified edition of the program, we decided

to do some investigation to determine if we could purchase an expanded version for the

school. Several days later, during a routine call to Scholastic, Inc. to cost out the

product, we soon learned that our school district had already purchased the entire

expanded program for several St. Croix schools, including ECJH—a detail that had

never been mentioned in any of our meetings.

The following week, we made yet another revealing discovery when we located

the SRC software package, still in its plastic wrapping, stored away in the school’s

library. We soon learned it had sat for almost two years unopened and unused. The

Foundation immediately took on the task of installing all components of the SRI and

SRC programs in addition to purchasing the necessary user licenses (at a relatively low

cost), which allowed every single student at the school to fully participate in the

program.

The following school year, during the second year of our Initiative, we hired a site

coordinator to support teachers in the full implementation of this program, as we sought

to not overburden them with yet another “new” resource. Then, in concert with school

administrators, we began planning for the purchase of the necessary books and quizzes

15 SRI and SRC are computer-based reading intervention programs that are meant to diagnose student reading levels and then monitor progress through a comprehensive reading program that provides recommendations for teachers, rewards programs, parental reports, and etc. The programs use the highly effective “Lexile” system that is used to accurately assess a student’s reading skills. For more information contact the Scholastic website at: http://teacher.scholastic.com/products/readingcounts/index.htm.


St. Croix Foundation’s MSI Site Coordinator, Magali Roldan,

in the new Reading Counts Library.

In ECJH’s brand new Scholastic Library

for the Reading Counts Program—yet another costly requirement. Luckily, before we

expended a single dollar for books, our site coordinator made another fortuitous

discovery, in an unused classroom…over one hundred boxes of soft-cover Scholastic

books, still in their boxes! Intended to establish individual classroom libraries at the

school, the Foundation proposed a more utilitarian use for those books; the creation of a

secondary, stand-alone Scholastic library that would entirely support the Reading

Counts Program.

At the end of the 2006-2007 school year, ECJH unveiled a true, model Scholastic

Reading Counts Library Annex, complete with comprehensive program policies and

procedures. That single accomplishment was

made possible due, in large part, to the

incredible commitment and hard work of our

MSI Site Coordinator, Magali Roldan, who

unpacked, processed, and shelved over 4000

books, with support from a Language Arts

teacher at the school.

By the start of the 2009-10 school year,

ECJH’s ongoing commitment to sustain this

program, beyond the Foundation’s direct

presence at the school, resulted in the school’s

Reading Counts Library boasting close to 7,500 books. Paid for with federal dollars,

ECJH’s library is a true testament of how leveraging limited resources can create

enrichment opportunities that benefit every child.

Filling Resource Gaps: Partnerships with a Purpose

Beyond the SRC Library and as our Initiative progressed, the Foundation

continued to look for the ways and means to maximize resources at ECJH. But, of

course, because of our firm commitment to literacy, much of our focus remained on how

to ensure the sustainability of the Reading Counts program. During the second year of

our Initiative, upon evaluating the program, we quickly realized that the school’s very

limited computer resources were not effectively serving students. Because both the

SRC and SRI programs required regular computer-based testing, the school was forced

to test anywhere from 300 to 400 students on 7-15 computers in two separate

locations—a laborious process that could take anywhere from three weeks to one

month.


The Foundation knew ECJH needed a fully equipped computer lab with enough

computers to accommodate one entire class at a time (approximately 30 students). We

immediately reached out to the HOVENSA oil refinery to assist us with addressing this

problem. And, HOVENSA generously responded, stepping up to the plate in a big way

by donating a state of the art computer lab and technology center, complete with 30 flat

screen computers, furniture, commercial air conditioning, and new window and door

enclosures.

HOVENSA also provided

architectural and construction personnel

to transform an underutilized classroom

into a modern, high-tech resource

center at a cost of over $100,000. In

demonstration of our appreciation to

them, the Foundation donated a new

security system and paid for a year of

monitoring to protect HOVENSA’s

costly investment.

The partnership that created

ECJH’s brand new Technology Center turned out to be a perfect representation of the

Foundation’s educational policy: brokering strategic private-public partnerships in order

to provide public school students with the high-quality educational curriculum, resources

and community-based support they need to be globally competitive.

HOVENSA’s generous contribution to ECJH also demonstrated that although

some in our private sector are indeed skeptical about donating to our public education

system, many businesses are actually eager to support our public schools, recognizing

them to be the biggest pool of potential workers in our community. The challenge is, of

course, finding just the right balance of trust and accountability to create strong,

meaningful, and high-impact private-public partnerships.

While the Foundation remains committed to brokering stronger relationships

between all educational stakeholders, based on our experience, we have concluded

that meaningful partnerships are not happening with ease here in the Territory—at least,

not yet. But once again, we’re not alone. According to Gary Funk and David Brown

(1994) in their article Reaching a Business/Education Equilibrium, “The sharing of

expertise [between private and public sectors] is the bedrock for effective relationships.

Despite their complementary knowledge and shared ideals, however, business and

education have yet to establish a successful symbiotic relationship.” This is clearly a

universal challenge for all of us seeking to make a difference in public education from

the outside, but it is one we are committed to meeting head on.

ECJH’s state-of-the-art Technology Center provides hands on learning

opportunities to over 400 public school students and is also used for

District-level training workshops.


Moving forward, we hope that the lessons we have learned thus far through our

Model Schools Initiative will serve to guide more of our community stakeholders to work

with greater fidelity to build effective, high impact partnerships that will create bridges to

success for our schools and the students that they serve. It is the Foundation’s mission

to fulfill our role as a community broker and convener as we collectively construct and

reinforce those bridges.


CHAPTER 6

Discipline and Structure—First and Always

Undoubtedly, the issue of discipline and structure is a highly sensitive one in our

community today, taking into consideration the fact that few campuses in the Territory

are spared the ravages of violence and chronic disciplinary infractions. According to the

2008 USVI Department of Education St. Croix District Discipline Report, there were

1,232 discipline infractions among our junior high schools and 814 in our high schools

during the 2007-2008 school year. Combine this with the total number of days junior

high and high school students were suspended, 3187, and two things become very

clear: 1) our teachers and administrators are being distracted from the business of

teaching and learning as focus continues to shift from instruction to behavioral

management; and 2) far too many of our students are spending too much time out of

the classroom (p. 3-4).

In the summer of 2008, as the Foundation began planning for the end of almost

four years of our direct presence at Elena Christian Junior High, we began reviewing the

wealth of data we had compiled over the course of our Model Schools Initiative. We also

began creating a list that prioritized the most critical components of successful schools,

based on our research and our experience. The issue of discipline and structure16 was

at the top of that list, right behind teachers and teaching quality. In our final assessment,

we now believe that creating a structured learning environment is, for many, if not all of

our public schools, one of the single most critical first steps toward success and high

achievement.

Not surprisingly, what we learned through our work at ECJH was substantiated

by data from successful schools throughout the country. Community stakeholders and

district leaders can offer all of the most innovative, well-intentioned academic-based

programs. And, our teachers and principals can have all resources and all the money

needed to implement them. But chances are, the programs simple won’t raise academic

achievement—not without significant and ceaseless focus on first creating an

environment that is conducive to learning!

Strangely enough though, this lesson was not that obvious to the Foundation

during the early stages of our MSI. We initially made a conscious decision at the

inception of our Initiative to focus our effort solely on academic-based supports. We

16 Researchers and educators advise that schools should first concentrate on classroom instruction before attempting to change the school’s structure. Disciplinary structure, however, is not organizational change or great modifications in a school’s mission and vision. In this segment, structure refers only to a practiced and understood set of disciplinary policies and procedures that create the necessary environment for quality instruction to take place.


placed all warnings and advice we received about the importance of structure on a

backburner out of an abundance of caution not to overstep boundaries by getting

involved in what we perceived to be strictly administrative matters.

The warnings we received were indeed many, and they came from very credible

sources, including our primary stateside public school partner, Truett Abbott, who is the

principal of the school after which most components of our own Initiative were modeled.

The Foundation was first introduced to Truett Abbott during a CNN news

segment17 about schools that were succeeding against all the odds. In the interview, Mr.

Abbott related to a CNN correspondent the details of how he had led his students, at

Warren County Middle School (WCMS) in rural Georgia, to staggering academic

success. Admittedly, through the lens of the television set, he seemed larger than life

and his students’ successes played more like fairytale than fact.

However, several weeks later, when we made direct contact with Mr. Abbott, he

was not only accessible and willing to take our call, but he was eager to share his

story—with amazing openness and transparency. He shared not only his successes,

but was frank about his challenges and the sheer will that it took to turn his school

around for the better.

Over the course of our Initiative, Mr. Abbott’s partnership continued to be an

invaluable asset as he advised and counseled us on everything from his “lessons

learned,” to his innovative instructional strategies. But, the single most consistent issue

that he hammered home to us throughout our conversations was the importance of

discipline and structure18.

During the first year of his reform efforts at WCMS, Mr. Abbott bravely and

abruptly aborted a comprehensive push to institute large-scale academic reforms in

order to first focus on discipline and structure. He spent an entire school year

implementing rigid, almost military-style policies and procedures—not just for his

students, but for his teachers and parents as well. His strategies included strict rules of

17 A copy of the CNN interview with Principal Truett Abbott can be found at the bottom of the transcript located at http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0607/10/ldt.01.html.

18 Principal Abbott is not alone in his theory and practice. In their 2007 report, Discipline as a Problem in Schools, Martin and Angus state that, in fact, the “Phi Delta Kappan/Gallup public opinion poll has consistently rated discipline as the number one or two problem in response to the question: what is the biggest problem facing public schools?” (para. 2).


conduct for students and a Seven Strike Discipline Policy19 that forced teachers to

become more accountable for student behavior before involving administrators.

Mr. Abbott also instituted policies that ensured teachers were always supervising

and interacting with students beyond classroom instructional time, including during class

transition periods, before school, after school, and at lunchtime. He took some

aggressive (bordering on controversial) steps to create a more structured environment.

This included such methods as installing glass panes in every classroom door so that

he could conduct daily, regimented “walk-throughs.” By doing so, Mr. Abbott was able to

monitor both teacher and student performance to ensure the highest quality of

learning20. It was only after Mr. Abbott had established the level of structure that he

envisioned for his campus did he begin implementing comprehensive, literacy-based

programs with stealth-like focus. Off-the-chart success soon followed.

Structure First, Then Programs

While Mr. Abbott’s style of supervision did raise a few eyebrows with his

colleagues, time and time again, when analyzing common threads among high-

performing schools all across the country, his message rang true: structure proved to

be, above all else, one of the most critical factors for successful reform efforts21.

In the end, despite our early resistance to Mr. Abbott’s advice, his experience at

WCMS proved to be too great a pull for us, as we began shifting our focus from

programs to discipline. His message to us from day one, and now our message to all

those who will listen, is this: schools must create a structured learning environment first

and then implement the programs after—while always holding educators accountable

for fulfilling their roles in educating, supervising, and nurturing children.

Of course, the Foundation wholly recognizes that the ultimate challenge for many

school administrators is finding just the right balance as they strive to create an

environment that is both structured and nurturing—something that requires great skill.

19 The Seven Strike Discipline Policy used by Truett Abbott outlines comprehensive, school-wide procedures for behavior management. For more information, contact the St. Croix Foundation.

20 Joan Gaustad (1994), author of School Discipline, noted that researchers find that those principals who are successful at implementing and maintaining an effective discipline program do not manage from their desks but instead “engage in… management by walking around” (p. 3).

21 Like Truett Abbott, Russ Thompson, a veteran teacher, principal, and author of Out of Control and Failing:

Improving Discipline and Learning at Two High Schools believes that: “First, [administrators] must acknowledge that there is a discipline problem and be determined [to] do whatever is necessary to fix it. Second [they must] establish a clear set of rules with fair and consistent consequences” (p. 1).


At ECJH, that challenge was particularly daunting as the 2006-2007 school year

ushered in an entirely new team of administrators to lead a bedraggled and wary

faculty.

The Foundation immediately coordinated a conference call between ECJH’s new

administrators and Truett Abbott to help guide and encourage them. During that call,

Truett provided some last minute advice to administrators, explaining to them that at

Warren County Middle School, his teachers had to “work, and they had to work hard!”

He made it crystal clear that at his school there simply were no excuses! Barring all

union obstacles, which he also has to contend with, he continued to place the greatest

focus first on high expectations for his teachers to build and maintain a structured

learning environment; and then on his students, as a close second, to live within those

parameters.

Now, although much of what we learned from Mr. Abbott was indeed instructive,

the Foundation was quietly unconvinced that his strategies were practical or that they

could be applied in our schools, in our community. We nonetheless modified some of

our programming to provide our pilot school with assistance in developing a more

structured learning environment.

And, after our third year at ECJH, we too had documented proof of the merit of

Mr. Abbott’s advice of “discipline and structure first!” Following the first tumultuous and

violent year at Elena Christian, which saw ongoing unrest and several all-out, school-

wide riots, the Foundation quickly conceded that our initial plan to not focus on student

discipline was indeed shortsighted.

Fortunately, under the leadership of Principal Willard John, who had heard Mr.

Abbott’s advice first-hand and took heed, ECJH made one of the most remarkable

transformations—from a school in crisis to a budding educational model. As it turned

out, Mr. John proved to be one of those rare breeds of middle school principals who had

the will, the capacity, and the skill to balance, almost effortlessly, relationship building

and discipline—essential leadership qualities for the challenging middle school student

population.

We actually spent a great deal of time observing Mr. John, assessing his

individual role in transforming ECJH from chaos to calm. In one instance, we would

observe him confidently subduing a volatile, out-of-control student, and in the next,

playing handball in the courtyard with others. Very few days went by when he failed to

greet students at the gate at the start of each day. And he never backed down from the

challenge of strictly enforcing disciplinary policies for most infractions.

In short order, we saw a clear shift take place as students began attending

orderly assemblies that no longer descended into pandemonium. We walked through


quieter hallways, and we felt a palpable change in the air as the culture of ECJH

transformed. The Foundation also documented almost every step taken by teachers

and administrators to slowly and tirelessly build structure, discipline, and a culture of

civility where there once was little.

Although we initially intended not to direct any focus or resources toward matters

of discipline and structure, by the end of our Initiative, we had done just the opposite.

We believe today that ECJH’s decision to focus significant attention on discipline as a

key component of their academic reform efforts, took great courage for administrators,

and it paid off in a big way for students, faculty, and staff.

Supporting Schools to Create Discipline and Structure

Undoubtedly, finding the systemic solutions for disciplinary problems has become

of prime importance for the Foundation. Based on our experience, we invariably have

concluded that this problem is due, in large part, to a persistent and systemic lack of

firm policies and procedures, as well as a pervasive lack of consistent enforcement in

our schools.

At ECJH, as we sought to address some of its organizational deficiencies, we

began assisting administrators with clarifying and communicating the school’s

expectations for students by posting signs listing appropriate behaviors on every wall of

the school over one summer. We also helped ECJH replicate a model program we

“borrowed” from another stateside model school partner by instituting Monday morning,

school-wide assemblies in which academic goals and expectations were communicated

and procedures like how to line up for the bus (a high-tension time for energetic middle

school students) and how to file into the auditorium were practiced and reinforced.

Although to most adults it would seem obvious that running through a hallway or

yelling at a friend is not appropriate behavior, the Foundation quickly recognized that

many students simply did not have sufficient guidance and direction to know better. We

continually reminded our school partners of the extent to which we, as adults, receive

direction in our everyday life to help us navigate through our day: “No Parking”, “No

Loitering”, “Stop”, “Yield”, and “Please Wait to be Seated.” It is so much a part of our

reality, and yet, if you traverse the halls of many of our schools, you will find little in the

way of the same direction. We deduced that for many students, without clear

boundaries, schools can be confusing, overwhelming and potentially hostile places.

Now, because of how intimately we worked each day with teachers, over time we

also began to realize that no one had directly informed students how to ask for a pencil

in the middle of a class lecture. What seemed like such an insignificant detail actually


required many teachers to stop their lessons to deal with one student’s small request.

When the requests to go the restroom, to get a book, or turn in late homework were all

added up at the end of the school day, teachers found that they were spending more

time on behavioral management than on actual teaching.

For two school years, the Foundation worked with administrators and faculty to

institute detailed policies and procedures, including introducing large-scale classroom

management strategies. We built comprehensive incentive programs that, yes, paid

students for academic performance and rewarded them for positive behavior while also

rewarding teachers for their successes. We researched national models for student and

faculty handbooks and then partnered with school administrators and teachers to

rewrite and print updated copies for the entire school. We also helped design and print

signs for classroom doors throughout the school that informed students what to

expect—and what was expected of them.

We collaborated with a network of model schools and ECJH faculty to build a

comprehensive Classroom Management Resource Binder22, which outlined every

procedure for every aspect of school routine—from how to walk between classrooms

and assemble in the auditorium to how to turn in homework (and account for not doing

homework). We compiled data on model programs from high-performing schools,

providing sample forms on CDs for easy printing and modification, and then, at the

request of EJCH administrators, we gave one comprehensive Classroom Management

Resource Binder to every faculty member free of charge. Our resource binder ultimately

represents one of the Foundation’s most successful projects—one that can be easily

replicated at other schools committed to addressing discipline and structure.

By the third year of our Initiative, after two years of strong and consistent

implementation and enforcement of disciplinary policies and procedures, academic

scores at ECJH rose sharply. Coinciding with this success, Elena Christian Junior High

School also recorded the fewest disciplinary infractions of all junior high and high

schools in the St. Croix District during the 2007-08 school year23.

22 For more information on the Classroom Management Resource Binder©, please feel free to contact the St. Croix Foundation directly.

23 Graphed Data from the Department of Education’s 2008 Discipline Report for the St. Croix District can be found in Chapter One.


Providing Safe, Nurturing Environments for Student Achievement

Today, the single most important lesson we have learned about discipline and

structure is this: before our schools can get really serious about instruction, they must

first get serious about building disciplinary structure. Ultimately, schools work best when

rules are consistent from classroom to classroom as well as outside of class, such that

students are not playing guessing games or testing boundaries. Procedures have to be

communicated, rehearsed, and reinforced from the very first day of school to the last, so

that students know what is expected of them—always. Likewise, teachers must be

given clear guidance on what is expected of them as well as how they will be held

accountable for meeting (or not meeting) those expectations.

In more ways than not, when dealing with the issue of discipline, our schools

have to be managed more like businesses in order to be successful, with clear policies

and procedures, ongoing performance evaluations, and consistent enforcement. It is

one of the most important roles that 21st Century schools must accept in order to

prepare students for successful lives after school—with the overarching goal being that

all will be “workplace ready.”

In the future, the Foundation will continue to do our part to support our educators

in making our schools safer and more conducive for real learning. We are committed to

providing more opportunities for our teachers to be exposed to innovative instructional

strategies and resources through our targeted professional development speaker

series. To date, the Foundation has already hosted five presentations including

speakers like Dr. Willard Daggett, President of the International Center for Leadership in

Education. We were also pleased to invite inspirational educator, Chelonnda Seroyer to

speak to St. Croix teachers in 2008, and most recently, Dr. Harry Wong, author of the

best-selling teaching resource of all time, entitled, The First Days of School24.

We will also continue to build our educational resource library and our network of

stateside model school partners as we stand ready to share best practices with willing

schools here in the Territory. Ultimately, we hope more of our community stakeholders

will likewise support the Foundation as we strive to support our schools in providing

safe, nurturing, and structured learning environments for all of our students. Anything

less is a failure on all our parts.

24 For more information about Dr. Harry Wong and to access his vast network of teacher resources on-line, visit his website at http://teachers.net/gazette/wong.html. For details on the Foundation’s past speaker symposiums, contact the Foundation directly.


CHAPTER 7

Bold Action and Innovative Reforms

Since launching our Model Schools Initiative over four years ago, the Foundation

has been both humbled and emboldened by what we have learned and what we have

accomplished. We are, today, incredibly sensitized to the complex challenges facing our

schools and our children and in turn are compelled to continue to advocate for the

highest quality educational standards for our community. Most of all, however, we have

come to recognize the incredible magnitude of this moment in our history when the call

for bold innovation in public education has never been louder.

The Foundation is especially encouraged by the fact that today there are real

roadmaps to assist community organizations like ours in charting a decisive course of

action in support of our schools and our students. But the reality for us is that, before

launching our Model Schools Initiative back in 2005, there really weren’t many

philanthropic organizations out there doing this kind of on-the-ground work. Early on, we

spent a considerable amount of time reaching out to a number of community

foundations for guidance and support, recognizing the risks and challenges inherent in

our programmatic format. We ultimately knew that trying to establish collaborative

partnerships with Local Education Agencies (LEAs) would undoubtedly test boundaries

that most community foundations live comfortably within.

We found very few organizations that had done what we were planning to do:

provide direct services to highly bureaucratic educational agencies in the quest to

support systemic improvement. Fortunately, one of the national organizations that we

learned was indeed playing a significant role in comprehensive public education reform

was the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. We immediately reached out to them.

At the time we made contact with the Gates Foundation in early 2005, they had

already spent more than one billion dollars over the course of six years in support of

innovative public high school models—an extraordinary commitment of resources for

any foundation. Their investment in education had also firmly established them as a

shining example of the growing stake that the private sector now has in trying to prepare

young people for the future.

As it turned out, through our outreach to the Gates Foundation, we were directed

to Ray McNulty, who had just weeks prior, left an executive level position with Gates to

join the International Center for Leadership in Education (ICLE).


Dr. Daggett speaks to key stakeholders on St. Croix in 2007.

With funding support from the Gates Foundation, among other sources, ICLE has

been studying high-performing and rapidly improving public schools across the country

for over 18 years, seeking to identify the specific components and characteristics of

success (and failure). They have, in turn, compiled an impressive catalogue of best

practices that they are sharing with struggling schools across the country who are eager

to move toward systemic reform.

As a dynamic partner of the Foundation, ICLE exposed us to a vast network of

educational resources, which served to deepen our understanding of the challenges

that all public schools face. Their data also illuminated the fact that the challenges

facing our public education system here in the Virgin Islands are not unique.

We quickly realized that there really are no excuses for failure, as an increasing

number of the poorest, most disadvantaged districts around our country now boast

schools that are thriving with students who are closing the achievement gap through the

guidance of passionate and skilled teachers and focused visionary leadership at every

level.

With collaboration from ICLE,

the Foundation accomplished a great

deal, not just at Elena Christian, but

throughout our local Department of

Education (DOE). Our first major

achievement came in 2007, when we

invited ICLE’s President, Dr. Willard

Daggett, to St. Croix after almost a

year of planning and fundraising25.

Through the decisive actions of

Dr. Lauren Larsen, then Acting

Commissioner of the DOE, the

Foundation convened an audience of

St. Croix District Administrators as

well as some community stakeholders

to listen to Dr. Daggett’s message of reform.

25 The St. Croix Foundation is an un-endowed community foundation that must raise funds each year to provide programs, grants, and scholarships in areas such as education, public safety, and community revitalization. To date, all funds expended during the course of the Model Schools Initiative have been raised through generous contributions.


It is important to clarify that, at the time of Dr. Daggett’s visit, district-wide

professional development was not a part of the Foundation’s MSI strategic plan, or our

budget. But, because of our growing understanding that many of our local educators

(particularly our teachers) were not being exposed to the success stories of real models

of educational excellence, the Foundation’s Board of Directors made the strategic

decision to expand our Initiative.

That expanded component of our programming involved moving beyond site-

based school supports in order to initiate and facilitate meaningful community

engagement. We felt confident that Dr. Daggett was a perfect vehicle for our new

programmatic agenda, which entailed building the necessary critical mass to spur

broad-scale reform efforts in the Territory.

Still, the Foundation was undeniably apprehensive about how Daggett and his

message would be received by our local educators, because as anyone who has heard

him speak knows, he does not wrap his message in politically correct platitudes that are

easy to swallow. His message is blunt and his finger-pointing for public education

failures spares no one (from educators to politicians to the media and to all of our fellow

community stakeholders).

To our great relief however, Dr. Daggett’s presentation received soaring high

marks from all attendees at that March 2007 symposium. So much so, in fact, that the

president of our local teachers’ union (among others in attendance) asked us to invite

Daggett back again—to share his message with St. Croix public school teachers who

were unable to attend the first symposium.

The Foundation obliged by committing to host a second, larger event for St. Croix

teachers less than a year later. But, even before Daggett’s second visit, the Foundation

responded to yet another DOE request to sponsor a delegation of local educators’

attendance at ICLE’s Annual Model Schools Conference in Washington, D.C. during the

summer of 2007. Our Board of

Directors once again courageously

supported that DOE request, agreeing

to commit money from the only

endowed fund at the Foundation to

sponsor a group of approximately 45

local educators from both school

districts. Generous donors and

corporate partners also dug deep to

provide additional financial support for

this endeavor. The VI Delegation, sponsored by the Foundation, with Dr. Willard

Daggett (second from left) at the 2007 Model Schools Conference.


Then, less than five months after ICLE’s summer conference, as we were

preparing for Daggett’s return, the Foundation took yet another deep breath and

decided to once again expand our plans by including the St. Thomas/ St. John District

on Dr. Daggett’s itinerary, in an effort to ensure the broadest impact on our educational

system. We ultimately sponsored two symposiums: one in each school district open to

every teacher and key education stakeholder in the Territory—a monumental milestone

for the DOE and for the Foundation26.

An even greater achievement came in the midst of Daggett’s second visit, when

we successfully coordinated a private meeting between Daggett and all high-level

education leaders in the Territory, including both district superintendents, members of

the Board of Education, the DOE Commissioner, and the Governor. What took place at

that meeting undoubtedly fulfilled the core mission of our Initiative—to support systemic

reform—when a commitment was made by the Department of Education to create a

delegation of local educators from every public school in the Virgin Islands to attend

ICLE’s 2008 Model Schools Conference.

In return, Dr. Daggett committed to build a “conference within a conference” just

for the VI, in a collaborative effort to launch a comprehensive, Territory-wide agenda for

systemic reform. We believe that measurable gains are already being made in our

public school system through ICLE’s ongoing partnership with the DOE. And, while the

Foundation is immensely proud of our role in brokering that relationship, we also believe

we have come full circle from that first phone call to the Gates Foundation so many

years ago.

As chance would have it, in January 2009, just as we were winding down our

work at ECJH and beginning to sort through the mountain of data we had compiled, Bill

Gates released his first Annual Letter to update the nation on his foundation’s

philanthropic work in education. There were many commonalities between his findings

and ours. We now believe that Bill Gates’ final conclusions, based on the wealth of data

collected by his organization, are incredibly instructive for the St. Croix Foundation, and

should also be for our entire community as well.

Having now spent over 2 billion dollars to attain the lofty mission of raising

college ready graduation rates nationally, Bill Gates publicly (and very courageously)

acknowledged in his 2009 Annual Letter that the Gates Foundation ultimately did not

achieve the results they wanted (p. 11). After nine years of time and diligent effort

26 The St. Croix Foundation’s sponsorship of Dr. Daggett’s Territory-wide presentations was made possible through the generous donations of Tropico Management and Marmarus Management.


dedicated to public education reform (and billions of dollars expended), Bill Gates

released some stark findings. In his words:

1. Many of the small schools that we invested in did not improve student

achievement in any significant way. These tended to be the schools that did

not take radical steps to change the culture such as allowing the principal to

pick their team of teachers or change the curriculum.

2. We had less success trying to change an existing school than helping to

create a new school.

3. …a few of the schools that we funded achieved something amazing. They

replaced schools with low expectations and low results with ones that have

high expectations and high results. Almost all of these schools were charter

schools that have significantly longer school days than other schools.

4. There was only half as much variation in student achievement between

schools as there [was] among classrooms in the same school… if [parents]

want [children] to get the best education possible, it is actually more important

to get [their children] assigned to a great teacher than to a great school. (p. 9-

12)

At the end of his Annual Letter, Gates wrote, “Based on what the Foundation has

learned so far, we have refined our strategy, and will continue to invest in replicating the

school models that worked the best” (p. 12).

Today, after four and a half years of work in our public schools here in the Virgin

Islands, the final conclusions we have drawn at the St. Croix Foundation about how to

achieve public education excellence in our community are, in many ways, closely

aligned with Gates’ and the rest of those who are pushing for reform (from the outside).

To be perfectly frank, based on everything we have learned and experienced to

date, we have deduced that our Territory can continue to pour millions of dollars into our

schools for years on end, and we can develop the most well intended strategic plans

and hire all the right people; however, if key stakeholders do not have the resolve or

the courage to make rapid, radical, and revolutionary changes that create a culture of

accountability and the highest standards for all throughout our public education system,

any claims of reform will be, very simply, rhetoric.


CHAPTER 8

Model Schools Initiative: Lessons Learned, Lessons Shared

Staying focused on solutions, there are some fundamental lessons, which the

Foundation has learned through our Model Schools Initiative that we now believe can

be instructive for our schools and community stakeholders. Our experience and our

findings indicate that by working collectively to create a boldly innovative, community

inclusive roadmap for educational reform, the Virgin Islands can indeed have high-

performing schools that provide high-quality learning opportunities for all students. The

St. Croix Foundation has identified five specific opportunities that we believe can lead to

rapid, systemic change in our public education system:

1) Relevant Curriculum and World-class Standards

According to Cathleen Norris (2009), co-founder of GoKnow, a technology-based

company committed to changing the way technology is used in the classroom, “Instead

of teaching the ‘what’ style of content—children need to learn ‘how’: how to work in a

team to solve a real problem in their community, how to frame that problem so it is

actionable, how to research it, how to develop a plan of action, and finally how to enact

that plan and actually build something” (What: The Vision, para. 1).

Norris’ position on relevant educational curriculum is echoed by the International

Center for Leadership in Education, who developed an industry-wide educational tool

called, “The Rigor/ Relevance Framework,” which is being used in schools across the

country to make educational curriculum and instruction more rigorous and more relevant

for all students. ICLE also developed several other innovative tools to assist

communities with engaging a broad sector of their professional business stakeholders in

defining relevant curriculum from a real-world perspective.

In 2007, at the request of the DOE, the Foundation launched the National

Essential Skills Study (NESS) in partnership with ICLE, in an effort to introduce more

relevant curriculum content into our public school classrooms. As a community-based

survey, NESS asks businesses and other stakeholders to rank the most important skills

they believe students should know and be able to do upon graduating from high school.

By providing a list of a broad range of current national curriculum standards in

four core disciplines (language arts, math, science, and social studies) the surveys,

when compiled, would reveal the most relevant curricular content necessary to prepare

students for workplace realities, both locally (and nationally). The end goal for the NESS

survey was ultimately to enable our school districts to compare local results against


national results, while also supporting faculty and community stakeholders in making

informed decisions about possible changes to its curriculum.

Unfortunately, although the Foundation was able to engage a number of local

businesses (both from the private and public sectors) in a wide array of industries27, we

failed to establish a strong enough partnership with the DOE to make the project

successful. As a result, the effort fell short of collecting the requisite number of surveys

necessary for a representative sample. Nonetheless, we still believe that completing

NESS should be a critical part of broad-based educational reform efforts in the

Territory28.

We stand ready to not only support future efforts to compile such data, but to

also ensure that the findings from the study are shared with the greater community in

order to facilitate real community engagement and involvement in the reform process.

2) New Approaches to Leadership

As we delve into the sensitive issue of Public Education Leadership, we have

opted to begin by simply stating a few facts about our personal experiences with

Department of Education leadership. During the first four (4) years of our MSI, our pilot

school, Elena Christian Junior High, saw three (3) Principals; six (6) Assistant

Principals; three (3) Insular Superintendents; three (3) Acting Commissioners; and two

(2) confirmed Commissioners—all with different (often times divergent) priorities,

management styles, and degrees of commitment to maintaining and embracing our

partnership and our programs. We firmly believe that nothing else we could say about

leadership more adequately paints the picture of what’s going on at the helm of each

level of our public education system, from the state and district-levels, right down to our

schools. Plain and simple, in our opinion, revolving doors do not a stable or effective

system make.

Although we cannot quantify the full impact of the level of turnover in the DOE,

we do know that most, if not all, of the successful schools that we partnered with or

researched had several commonalities relative to leadership trends. The main parallel is

27 The St. Croix Foundation formally thanks the Juan F. Louis Hospital, Hovensa LLC, the VI Department of Labor, Tropico Shipping, the teachers and administrators of the Department of Education 2007 VI Delegation, and many other individuals and businesses for their timely and wholehearted support in completing the National Essential Skills Study.

28 The National Essential Skills study was created to ensure that the material teachers are asked to have students master is truly relevant to today’s world. As it stands, public school teachers are required to cover more material than ever before, some of which is simply no longer relevant as the standards were created or added 10, 20, and sometimes 30 or more years ago.


that high-performing schools were consistently shepherded by stable, high-performing

leaders. And most of those leaders were directly responsible for handpicking most of

their own leadership team.

Of course, this does not mean that other districts do not, at times, employ some

of the same rotation tactics that we see here in the Territory. In fact many of them do.

But, once leaders began to perform with demonstrated results, many districts stepped

back, got out of the way, and let successful leaders lead—even if it meant watching

scores slip a bit early on as whole-scale, systemic reform efforts got under way.

Now, for the purpose of this report, the Foundation has chosen to focus primarily

on our public school principals, recognizing their direct role in guiding our schools to

success. Having worked closely with three different principals at ECJH, one of the most

perplexing issues for us has been the degree to which the recruitment and selection

process for principals at our public schools is entirely insular. In a world where global

economics rule the day, it is wholly baffling that our principals continue to be drawn

solely from the ranks of our local public school teacher pool.

The Foundation is not at all suggesting that there are no highly qualified leaders

at the helms of some of our schools already. Quite the contrary, if one only takes a look

at most of our highest performing public schools here in the Territory today, they need

not look much further than the principal (and their team of teachers).

As authors Susan Gray and William Streshly (2008) conclude in the book From

Good Schools to Great Schools, the data does indeed reflect that most great schools

are led by great principals (p. 2-5). Yet, locally without sufficient “density” in the

leadership pool within our public education system, the prospect of all of our schools

being led by the brightest and the best remains slim.

Another issue, which adds to the complexity of the matter is the fact that

principals (separate and apart from their title) are almost exclusively teachers. Plucked

from their classrooms by legitimate promotion (or by appointment), they go from

supervising approximately 30-50 students at a time to being charged with effectively

managing 500-1000 member organizations and crumbling facilities.

The Foundation is mindful that this is certainly not a challenge unique to the V.I.,

but rather one with which most school districts across the nation struggle. And, it is

undoubtedly easy to understand the complex challenge before our principals as they

struggle to balance instructional leadership responsibilities with their management

function. But fortunately, the Foundation believes that some plausible answers for how

to address this issue can be found by looking at innovative model programs abroad.


In one example, several years ago, the Puerto Rico Community Foundation

(PRCF) launched a highly successful educational initiative seeking to address this very

issue of building their public education leadership pool. By pairing public school

principals with high level corporate executives, PRCF provided local educators with

one-on-one mentoring opportunities that they would otherwise not be privy to.

In evaluating that program, principals in Puerto Rico overwhelmingly concurred

that their real-world mentors were one of the most valuable resources they had in

developing their skill sets as managers. While PRCF’s Initiative represents only one

example of innovative solutions to systemic problems, the good news is that there exist

many more models of how leadership development in public education can be achieved

by employing innovative, collaborative, and cost-effective strategies.

Recognizing the incredible need for targeted leadership development

opportunities for our educators here in the Virgin Islands, the Foundation will be

dedicating a significant portion of our MSI programming and budget to support

professional development resources for our administrators. Included in our offerings will

be training in areas like human resources management, fiscal management, and

strategic planning in order to build core management skill-sets in our public school

leaders.

3) Charter Schools… a viable option?

As Bill Gates reported in his 2009 Annual Letter, of all the schools funded by

the Gates Foundation, the ones that achieved the most significant gains were

almost exclusively charter schools (p. 11). This single piece of data struck us as

particularly interesting because, throughout our entire MSI, the Foundation did not

dedicate focus or attention to the issue of charter schools as a viable pathway for

achieving rapid educational reform in the Virgin Islands. Instead, we maintained our

commitment to our local Department of Education and the potential we firmly believe it

has to successfully close the achievement gap for our students.

Today, however, the Foundation is taking note of the growing body of evidence

which is clearly pointing toward charter schools as one (of several) unique variables in

almost every successful public school district.

For those who do not fully understand what charter schools are, or how they

function, the United States Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences

(2008) defines them as:

“Publicly funded schools that are typically governed by a group or organization

under a contract or ‘charter’ with the state, which exempts the school from


selected state or local rules and regulations. In return for funding and autonomy,

the charter school must meet accountability standards, [and is] reviewed

(typically every 3 to 5 years) [at which time, the contract] can be revoked if

guidelines on curriculum and management are not followed or the standards are

not met” (para. 2).

In practical application, charter schools have historically been vehicles for

creating innovative educational opportunities for parents and students such as science

and arts academies, as well as same-sex and college preparatory schools. It is

precisely because of innovative options of choice like these that many proponents

believe so strongly in charters— that and the fact that they afford educators

opportunities to bypass the chokehold bureaucracy that is commonplace in most

departments of education.

But, the stark truth is that there really is no guarantee that charters will offer

students anything better than conventional public schools do, as many have actually

reported worse achievement results—a real conundrum for parents and community

leaders. In a recent interview, Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education for the U.S. DOE

summed the issue up like this, “I do not support charter schools. I support good charter

schools”29.

Fortunately for discriminating proponents like Arne Duncan, there are a growing

number of exceptional charter schools that are producing rapid and extraordinary

results. Those success stories are in turn presenting an almost iron-clad argument in

support of comprehensive, structural innovation in education for an increasing body of

stakeholders who were previously sitting on the fence about charter schools.

Still, despite the fact that more and more charters are popping up all over the

country and despite the fact that they are, indeed, privately run public schools, there is

(more often than not) incredible sensitivity and controversy that surrounds the mere

mention of the word “charter.” The issue of charters is inevitably one which creates

great chasms in many communities, primarily because at the core of the matter is

money. As dollars that have been historically and faithfully dedicated to failing public

schools are increasingly being re-directed to charters, huge political firestorms and

major losses of critical federal funding are becoming commonplace in underperforming

school districts across the country.

29 Secretary of Education Arne Duncan appeared on the Tavis Smiley Show in early 2009 as a part of President Barack Obama’s nationwide focus on public education reform.


Either way one looks at it, the fact of the matter is that, at present, the Virgin

Islands stands alone with a handful of other states (10 to be exact) that have not

passed the requisite charter legislation that must be enacted prior to allowing for the

creation of even one charter school in any school district. As such, the mere possibility

of charter schools in the Territory is completely out of reach for our students, parents,

and educators as an option.

Taking into consideration the fact that much of the research we came across

affirms that great charter schools are often predicated by strong charter legislation, it

would behoove stakeholders to become actively engaged in reviewing model

legislation to fully understand all of the critical issues involved in the creation of

effective charter schools.

Today, with the USDOE pledging billions of dollars in support of innovative public

school models and promoting the expansion of charter schools nationwide, the

Foundation believes the Virgin Islands would be remiss not to examine this option more

closely. For our part, we simply recommend that every education stakeholder in our

community begin doing research of their own on charter schools, particularly the likes

of KIPP, Green Dot, Mastery, and the Harlem Children’s Zone’s Promise Academy- all

exceptional models that are completely redefining public education. Ultimately,

everyone even remotely passionate about the state of public education in the Territory

must collectively determine if charter schools are a viable consideration for the Virgin

Islands, post haste.

4) Private - Public Partnerships: Inviting Key Stakeholders to the Table

Over the course of our Model Schools Initiative, the Foundation has continually

heard from local education stakeholders about the need for greater community

engagement in addressing some of the complex issues facing our schools. Yet, our

experience at times left us feeling unwelcome and unappreciated, in spite of our

shared goals, time expended, and $300,000-plus investment of scarce resources. As a

consequence, we are, today, keenly sensitive to the enormous role which trust and

fidelity play in building and sustaining meaningful private-public partnerships.

It is also abundantly clear to us that both schools and community stakeholders

must find middle ground in order to develop the kinds of partnerships that produce

meaningful outcomes for our students and our public schools. But, for that to happen,

all stakeholders must first come to recognize that so long as the success of our

children is central to everyone’s agenda, then we are all on the same side.


Fortunately, the Foundation believes there are some very specific guidelines that

can serve to foster more high-impact partnerships between our private and public

sectors in support of a high-quality educational system including the following:

Corporate and community-based organizations must strive to better balance our

interests and priorities with individual school needs in order to find more mutually

beneficial opportunities for collaboration. Businesses must also do a better job at

dialoguing with educators about why reform is urgently necessary…from an

economic perspective.

Corporate donors must demand more from school partners (like detailed

justifications for funding requests, implementation plans, and timelines) before

donating resources to schools to ensure the highest degree of commitment and

accountability.

Schools and district-level management must be open to learning how to better

leverage and manage existing resources for maximum impact in order to guard

against duplication and waste of donated resources and federal dollars.

By diversifying brokers and inviting the private sector to the table when important

decisions need to be made, school and district leaders can, at times, marry

strengths and overcome weaknesses—in turn, netting greater results for all.

Education stakeholders must learn to ask the private sector for more than just

money because, sometimes, mentoring means more.

The Foundation is committed to fulfilling our role as a community convener by

sponsoring guided roundtable conversations with businesses and other community

stakeholders with the goal of developing innovative strategies for providing our children

with the highest quality public education opportunities.

Looking to national (and international) models of collaborative community-based

efforts, all of our sponsored activities will be tied to very specific outcomes that are

reliant upon broad-based community involvement. As always, we will strive to build

strong, sturdy bridges between our private and public sector partners.

5) Strategic Grant Making

As we now look to the future, the Foundation will continue to focus our

programmatic agenda on providing our public schools with relevant resources as we

strive to sustain the original, overarching goal of our Model Schools Initiative—


supporting systemic reform. We will also be aggressively working towards building our

public education endowment so that we may continue to serve generations of students

in our schools.

Recognizing that many of our community’s corporate and private-sector

stakeholders are searching for meaningful opportunities to get involved and to support

our public education system, the Foundation will launch a new and exciting component

of our Initiative. This new Community Grants Program, will afford community

stakeholders and businesses, opportunities to make the greatest impact on student

achievement through strategic grant-making. Our program will consist of the following

grants:

Rigor & Relevance - Innovative Instruction Teacher Grants, which support

innovative classroom instructional strategies and life skills curriculum.

Professional Development Grants, which provide Teachers and Teacher Teams

with opportunities to acquire additional educational training targeted to their

specific needs—with the ultimate goal of enhancing instructional skills and

promoting higher academic achievement of students.

School Improvement Grants, which support facility improvements that directly

impact student performance.

Career & Technical Education Grants, which support innovative and relevant

vocational education programs.

Youth Philanthropy Grants, which promote youth philanthropy and civic

engagement amongst our students.

Youth Scholarships, which support students wishing to participate in targeted

educational programs in areas such as math, science, and the arts.


FINAL THOUGHTS

“Make No Small Plans”

The issue of public education reform is unquestionably one that will be garnering

national focus as the Obama Administration continues to dedicate more attention and

resources to innovative programs and strategies than any other administration in recent

history. Some organizations are actually predicting that 2010 will be one of the single

most important years for public education, as community stakeholders (many of them

from the private sector) play more pivotal roles in the push for reform.

At a recent symposium in Chicago, Illinois, sponsored by Grantmakers for

Education and entitled Make No Small Plans, foundations from all over the country

convened in an historic call to arms to collaboratively and resolutely advocate for public

education reform. Keynote speakers at this momentous gathering included; U.S.

Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan; Geoffrey Canada, visionary leader of the

nationally recognized Harlem Children’s Zone; civil rights leader, Jesse Jackson; and

Davis Guggenheim, director of the Oscar Award winning film, An Inconvenient Truth,

who is set to release his newest project on the state of public education in America,

entitled Waiting For Superman.

For three days, conference attendees heard about bold and innovative reform

efforts taking place around the country, and for three days, we were all challenged and

prodded to take some of the most courageous and aggressive steps in support of what

many are now calling “the greatest civil rights issue of our time”30. The St. Croix

Foundation, today, publicly and unequivocally accepts that challenge.

Through our Model Schools Initiative, we will continue to support our public

schools in preparing our students to be armed and ready to compete in a 21st Century

global economy. We have drafted this document, which chronicles five years of our on-

the-ground work in our public schools, in an earnest and urgent attempt to engage our

entire community in informed and dynamic conversations about the future of our public

education system.

While we acknowledge some significant efforts being undertaken by our local

Department of Education to create a more strategic reform agenda, the pace of change

30 In a 2009 news conference, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan stated that, “With high school drop-out rates unacceptably high and college completion rates far too low, education is clearly the civil rights issue of this generation…Every child and adult deserves a quality education. This is the only lasting way to fuel our economic recovery and end stubborn cycles of poverty and social failure” (Woodhead, para. 2-3).


is simply not ensuring that every child that graduates from our public schools will be

workforce ready… today!

The Foundation is more committed than ever before to become a fierce, tireless

advocate for our children’s success and for their futures! In reality, our children need

every one of us striving on their behalf. The St. Croix Foundation courageously leads

that charge, and we invite all of our community stakeholders to join us in fulfillment of

our motto—Together We Can

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THE MODEL SCHOOLS INITIATIVE PHASE I REPORT

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Christiansted, St. Croix, US Virgin Islands 00820 (t) 340.773.9898 * (f) 340.773.8727

www.stxfoundation.org